Sisilla, the narrator of Kraus’ first foray into SF, is a Niffakoq, one in a line of golden children selected for special missions, their brains enhanced with six “niks,” small implants that bestow deeper reserves of intelligence and empathy. These are effectively suicide missions—Niffakoqs traditionally die before their teens. But of course Sisilla isn’t traditional, […]
Marie Jones may have recently solved a murder case on the reality show Sex Island as her “sexy alter ego” Luella van Horn, but now she’s back in New York City. Broke, alone, and stuck in midtown Manhattan in the August heat, she’s moving out of an apartment she can’t afford and desperate for a […]
In a world that’s been divided into four rival factions in the wake of a devastating event known as the Annihilation, 23-year-old Rubi Morningtail—an Azure refugee living in the Dominion of the Silver Tyger—finds herself thrust into a world of political intrigue, powerful magic, and deadly martial arts. When Rubi injures a battle tyger in […]
In his candid debut memoir, Hotchkiss, a magazine writer turned men’s life coach, describes the life events that precipitated negative feelings of powerlessness around his associations with women. Germaine to this emotional problem was his parents’ divorce when he was a child, being raised first by a single mother and then a controlling stepmother. Worse […]
Doug Fir is eager to change color, hibernate, or migrate; he observes these phenomena around him every autumn and pines for transformation or even transplantation. Unable to cease chlorophyll production, he sadly must be “forever green.” His migrating friend Robin drops the bombshell news that palm trees are evergreens, too, and carries Doug’s letter bemoaning […]
Despite her brief moment of internet fame after catching a killer at a crime writing festival in A Novel Murder (2025), Jane is without an agent or publisher, and suffering from writer’s block. Still, she has journeyed from Cumbria to London’s Willow Tree Books to celebrate the publication of a debut thriller by her new […]
Teddy Riggs prefers to be known as Daytona: “Fastest on the field. Fastest on the road.” Third-generation scion of an oil family, he’s been cut off from his trust fund by his parents and lives with Granny, who will cook him a dozen eggs to slake the appetite he’s developed on “the juice.” His “roid […]
The author immigrated from Romania to the United States in 1902, when he was 8 years old. In this work, he looks back at growing up in New York City’s Lower East Side in an Orthodox Jewish family. Following Parker from his arrival at Ellis Island to his family’s struggles running a grocery store, readers […]
The self-declared “worst” kid in his gifted circle of friends—the one with seemingly no talent for anything except getting into trouble—has spent his final year at Jerome Marco K-8 collecting disaster stories with his Team Bomb Shelter crew: martial arts cousin Adam, science whiz Rover, statistics prodigy Sean, wheelchair-using brainy beauty Helen, bighearted athlete Charlie, […]
In her excellent biography of Houston, cultural critic Lordi contrasts the legendary singer and actor with other Black cultural innovators, like Nina Simone, writing that Houston “appears not as a visionary but as a femme object we gaze at or gape at, asking what happened to her, not what she did.” She has a point. […]