The stranger comes into the general store on a misty afternoon and buys a roast, a dozen prime ribs, a pound of calves’ liver, flour, sugar and bread, all without small talk. The regulars round the old oil stove watch him tuck a thirty-pound carton under one arm as though it were a pillow. After […]
Hey there! We have an all-fiction edition! Hooray! They’re also all fantasy novels. Most of them are on the cozier side, which I thought might be needed in the leadup to the US midterms. Don’t forget to vote and then maybe treat yourself to a book for doing your civic duty. Do you have any […]
The storm comes up out of a flat August calm. By night the sea off Whitby is mountainous, the new searchlight on the East Cliff is sweeping the water, and a foreign schooner with every sail set comes racing between the piers with a corpse tied at the helm, its head swinging with each roll. […]
Synopsis: When freelance writer Charlie Jensen injures herself in a holiday DIY accident, she finds herself laid up with only ten days to prep for her annual Holiday Tea. Her cat Steve is useless at babysitting, but fortunately, her good friend, Dev Bhandari is willing to help. Trauma doctor Dev Bhandari has been ordered to […]
Through a chink in the boards of a lean-to built against a cottage wall, a creature watches a family he has never met. There is a blind old man who plays a stringed instrument, a young woman who weeps when she thinks nobody can see her, and a young man who goes out each morning […]
A guest has come to tea dressed in black. She sits on a small, uncomfortable chair in a drawing room of rose brocade and Dresden figurines, beneath a portrait of a dead woman, and she holds a little rum cake on the edge of her saucer that she will not, under any circumstances, eat. Her […]
An atmospheric gone girl mystery with a fantastical, grisly twist As a band of four, Aislin, Breena, Vivien, and Poppy have haunted their cultish town of Devil’s Pointe, bound together by their traumatic, off-kilter upbringings. Driven to flee from its puritanical populace, the girls spend weeks planning their escape to the woods, only to be […]
A provocative and insightful exploration of trust, leadership, and a better way to play the business game The Damn Rules by Nick Richtsmeier is a refreshing, down-to-earth book about the opposing mental models we use to approach business, leadership, and careers. Richtsmeier calls these mental models the “extractive game” and the “expansive game.” The extractive […]
There is a bumblebee on Signy’s pillow, and it should not be there. The bees live in the gardens, and Signy is in bed, in the early artificial dawn of a moonlet where the wall lights warm to orange on a schedule. She coaxes the exhausted insect into her cupped hands, walks it through the […]
The nutcracker weighs about as much as a piano. It was carved from a single log, it stands taller than most men, and on the coldest night of December Ella Chambers is dragging it, wrapped in old blankets, out of a mansion basement and across an icy driveway toward a car that is older than […]