The best part of Callie McFee’s post-work evening run is chatting with Barney, an unhoused man who always sits on the same park bench on her route. Thanks to her brother, State, a local homicide detective, she’s one of the first people to hear the tragic news of her friend’s fatal shooting. Just as shocking […]
Devra Denniston is a very successful (and very private) scientist and academic, who, as the story opens, is at her 75th birthday party. Her best friend, journalist Alison Mellows, wants to write Devra’s biography, which she proposes as a gift. Devra resists strenuously at first, but later she falls mysteriously ill with a malady whose […]
This illustrated feast frames Fire Island not simply as a queer sanctuary, but as an incubator of queer style across the 20th century. Dempsey, president of the Fire Island Pines Historical Society, is an engaging guide to a vibrant history: Readers learn that Oscar Wilde is said to have visited in Cherry Grove in 1882; […]
The Indian government has a family-planning slogan: “Hum do hamare do”—literally “two of us, two of ours,” or “[Mom + Dad] + [Kid 1 + Kid 2].” So why does 12-year-old Chandni’s household number five, with Diya Masi, her maternal aunt, living under the same roof? Neither Chandni nor her older brother, Suraj, ever asks; […]
The Waga-Laga Bugs are a family of three beetles: one larger, blue-green, and roach-like; one pinky-orange and antlered; and one yellow and child-sized with glasses. More than anything, the Waga-Laga Bugs love to play. They try to convince the bees to join them, but they’re too busy preparing for a storm, as are the ants, […]
Fourteen-year-old Mikayla Grebe is days away from taking the Fulfilled Genetic Potential test and proving she’s worth society’s investment. The fear of losing Elite status and becoming a Defective or an Expendable always looms. She knows that “you can lose everything in a moment”—like her friend Carmen, who vanished with her family one day. But […]
With overtones of both Predator and Lord of the Flies, Reintgen’s latest includes a power struggle and multiple secret agendas, which come into play after a storm-tossed disaster leads to a rapidly rising body count among the dwindling handful of survivors. The author’s proven flair for concocting unusual sorts and strains of magic is on […]
Sam is in her early 30s, two years out of her English and Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, and, like many of her cohort, barely scraping by as an adjunct. When she lands a spot at Rosedale, an elite private college, as a last-minute replacement for an older professor, her problems seem temporarily solved. Sam is […]
“Four acres, steel fence, two warehouses, three forklifts, one-thousand cars, and a junkyard dog”; for the temperamental, uneducated Harry Saunders, his new wrecking yard in the desert was an empire to command. His 9-year-old daughter, Robyn, wrenched from suburban life in Laguna Beach, California, warmed up to it more slowly. She began working the junkyard […]
The table is where this loving Black family enjoys the first meal of the day; it’s where the children do homework and make cookies and where everyone prepares for fish fry Fridays. Extended family shares space here during somber moments, such as deaths, and on happier occasions, including birthdays, Kwanzaa, and other holidays. Grandpa regales […]