Seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Alex thinks she’s seen every variety of foster mom. Her latest one, Monica, seems to be the overly earnest and anxious type. Alex has always been an urbanite, residing in San Francisco and other cities, so living in rural Jefferson, California, with Monica is an adjustment. (There is dial-up internet, and many cows.) In […]
In truth, it’s quite a while before Mike takes center stage because half of these stories are told to him by his friend and mentor, retired warden Charley Stevens, whose narratives are provoked by events in the present. In “The Bear Trap,” Charley goes hunting for Sweet Tooth, a hermit who’s reported to have carried […]
Early on in his memoir, Capehart, best known as a commentator for MSNBC and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, writes of being known among his Southern cousins as “Mr. Peabody,” the bookishly bespectacled cartoon dog. “And I was a little ‘funny,’” he adds. “That was the gentler f-bomb used for someone believed […]
Activist Jiménez’s childhood in Quito abruptly ends when her sister dies and Ecuador’s deteriorating economy forces her parents to make an unexpected choice: to leave their beloved country to immigrate to the United States. The family moves to Queens, New York, where, as undocumented immigrants, they strive to hide their status by working hard, avoiding […]
It’s been approximately a decade since vampires crawled from the grave and destroyed most of human civilization in a brutal, blood-soaked uprising. Orphaned twins Ripley and Ruby Clemmons were rescued from the Open—the wasteland between human enclaves where monsters roam free—by a man named Barnett who took them to Vaille (North Carolina’s biggest human compound) […]
Journalist and podcaster Princiotti isn’t ashamed of her pop-music obsession, and thinks you shouldn’t be, either. She traces her love of the genre back to 2003, when she was 9, and “Hilary Duff was the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family.” The subject of Princiotti’s book is the […]
The author invites readers on a “journey of self-recovery where [they’ll] know with every molecule within [them] that [they] are worthy.” Sánní discusses her training in practices like Neuro-Linguistic Programming and her experience working as a personal coach for women. She also details her firsthand experience with challenges like finding oneself in a “self-imposed prison […]
Ruby Lee Becker is only 10 years old in 1935 when she sits at the double funeral for her grandmother, Alma, and baby sister, Nell, both of whom succumbed on the same day to the deadly dust plague. Ruby’s mother, Willa Mae, is frozen with grief. Just days later, Ruby falls ill with “dust pneumonia” […]
The writer presents a bold experiment: a poetic dialogue between himself and an AI tool (ChatGPT), which he calls “Adam” and credits as a co-author. Amid politically and ethically charged debates about the use of AI in writing, Ditson steps into this gray area with curiosity and care. Rather than framing artificial intelligence as a […]
After falling asleep one evening, Korean American James Mun is seemingly transported to a surreal world. But this isn’t a dream; it’s “the Flowering,” a dimension some people access via sleep. After meeting Bloom, a giant, lovable blue wolf who instantly takes to him, James joins Bloom’s Crew Blue, consisting of E (the leader), Honey, […]