Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s […]
Few writers have seen their work reinterpreted as much as Jane Austen’s. “We all encounter Austen differently and from the position of where and when we read her,” writes the scholar Jennie Batchelor in the book’s introduction. “How we read her changes as the world changes around us.” This anthology, a melange of fiction, poetry, […]
Every scenario seems implausible until it actually happens, as any military planner knows. When newspaper reporter Carmela Jean “CJ” Martino and her new husband, Lt. Joe Delano of the U.S. Marine Corps, get married in Waikiki on December 5, 1941, the pace of Japanese aggression feels distant, at best. CJ is more concerned about what […]
After moving from Portland, Oregon, to France for her father’s job, Tosh grows increasingly fond of Paris, even if her language skills need some work. Her sweet American neighbor Nick takes her on fabulous, quirky tours and introduces her to new friends who share her curiosity about the world; former debate team member Tosh loves […]
Ziva is a Maine coon cat who lives with the Freedmans. It’s unclear what happened before she arrived there, because although she’s sweet and calm with them, she finds strangers upsetting: “Ziva would leap like lightning. Claws out. Eyes blazing. Like she was guarding something only she could see.” One day, Elsie arrives to stay […]
As Vassar classicist Dozier observes, white supremacism has long looked to ancient Greece and Rome to justify the insupportable: the separation of humans into races and the necessity of hierarchy, which “means that white people should rule over others, and inferior people should accept this.” Troublingly, there is some rationale for this: Aristotle took slavery […]
A little over three years after he returned in triumph from his epic exploration of the North American West with William Clark, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in October 1809 of gunshot wounds at a small inn along the historic Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Ever since, historians have debated how he died, with most opting […]
Joseph “Breeze” Bye, a wheelchair-bound former professional baseball player, is on the cusp of finding major success in his second, post-accident career: painting. Breeze paints portraits of great pitchers—players who are as good as he was, before he was the victim of a hit-and-run. As a major exhibition of his work in New York City […]
John Keating’s edgy first-person narrative jumps around over the decades from 1987 to 2021, studded with brilliant character sketches. Chief among them are Keating’s fellow teacher and former girlfriend, Enid Smeal, a dedicated artist with little time for personal interactions; her awkward son, Jacob; the boy’s classmate Clara Hightower, serious and calm beyond her years; […]
The titular pair have settled into second grade, but worrywart Shermy has plenty to contend with, from a substitute teacher who doesn’t follow the class schedule to anxieties about Shake’s possible upcoming move. Short sections, organized by month from December through February, contrast Shermy’s orderly nature and “fizzy and loud” Shake’s more laid-back one. On […]