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INSPIRATION FROM 9,000 MILES AWAY

“Like food, songs too can speak without words,” writes the Seattle-based author at one point in this offbeat memoir. “A melody stirs a memory as a dish summons nostalgia. Both speak the language of the heart.” This creative book isn’t merely about the author’s love of music, though, but also her love of cooking, and […]

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KWAN’S LAST MISSION

As World War II winds down in 1945, Commander M.T. Kwan returns from serving with the British to his war-ravaged hometown of Guilin, China. As the Japanese pull back, Kwan—aka The Dragon—hopes to retrieve his family from where they’ve taken refuge farther inland. Colonel Lindsay Ride, his commandant with the British Army Aid Group, shows […]

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MELANCHOLY I & II

First published in 1995 and 1996, Fosse’s Melancholy novels predate his much-admired Septology books, his best-known work among English readers. Fans of those books will detect the emergence of his signature style here—recursive, musical, stream-of-consciousness prose that circles hawklike over themes of art, faith, and death. Fosse’s subject is Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), a painter who […]

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THE BREAST

German art historian Zimmerman examines ways that the breast—“an overdetermined body part”—has been highly politicized, evoking contradictory and impassioned responses across many areas of Western culture throughout history. Translated by Barfoot, Zimmerman’s well-researched study draws on a wide-range of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, theology, feminist theory, gender studies, and art history, to illuminate the connection […]

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BLACK GIRLS DON’T CRY

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 […]

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HAND-ME-DOWN

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 […]

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FORGIVENESS AT GROUND ZERO

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 […]

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IF BOOKS COULD KILL

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 […]

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100 YEARS OF LAUGHTER

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 […]

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CRIMES AND SINS

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 […]