Seventeen-year-old Ida Carter, who’s Black and bisexual, understands that beauty is currency. As the vice president of Banneker High’s Black Student Union, Ida is “Black popular.” She’s earned respect among the few Black students at her predominantly white school, but she’s nowhere near the top of the overall social hierarchy, and she’s not considered desirable […]
In this graphic memoir, white-presenting gay boy Damian and his older brother live with their grandmother Nanny; their mother died when they were toddlers. Nanny cared for the boys, trying “really hard to fill the mom-shaped hole” in their lives and to “be the mother who had never been there for her.” Now in eighth […]
Harris, co-author of The Forgive for Good Recovery Workbook (2025), was delighted by his April 2001 appointment to historic Saint Paul’s Chapel in Lower Manhattan, which George Washington attended after his inauguration and had long lacked full-time clergy. Born in a small town in South Carolina, Harris writes that he was encouraged to “to attract […]
Roxie Mitchell loves beating up guys at the gym and going on wild adventures. She doesn’t believe in love, but she does believe in romance—at least as it’s concocted by her favorite author. A chance encounter with a mysterious panhandler and a meet-cute at the library make her wonder if her offhand wish to be […]
Berman, an author of multiple pop-culture histories, frames this story as one medium rapidly overtaken by another: Vaudeville was supplanted by silent films, then radio, then talkies, then variety television, then sitcoms. Each era had its superstars—Charlie Chaplin, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, and more—not to mention its scandals. (Berman details the case […]
In this work, the author follows up The Canvas (2023) with the third installment in the Big Picture trilogy. Protagonist Emma Kelly is an art recovery agent. Her current mission is to locate 70 works that were originally bequeathed to the Vatican but have since been stolen. To complicate matters, it’s unclear how many of […]
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 […]
Ruby Spencer has two missions: She works to free men who are wrongfully incarcerated and facing the death penalty, and she searches for missing women. Mitchell Brown is the latest in a long line of death row clients, some of whom she has saved, many of whom she has not. In the small town of […]
She calls herself Kikiloa, but she’s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in “the deep night of Africa’s great rift valley” some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, […]
The book’s novelistic terrain will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town in the Southern U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Readers first meet Liam, the youngest of the four Menschen kids. Their mother, Vivian, was a Marlowe, a firmly rooted family whose members were considered local gentry. They […]