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 …
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 …
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 …
Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was the standard way of impressing letters onto a page for 400 years until German-born watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler came along. Gutenberg’s machine could mold a text only one letter at a time; Mergenthaler’s Linotype could mold an entire line at a time in hot metal with its “troop of …
Tween cousins Bea and Céline Bellerose, who had Parisian adventures in The House of Found Objects (2025), are reunited in New York City, where their Aunt Juliette, a journalist, is interviewing French actor Eva Rousseau about her first Broadway role. But when the Tiffany Yellow Diamond necklace Eva is borrowing goes missing, Aunt Juliette is …
Dina Soto first lost her older brother, Joel, to tragic circumstances—and soon after, her high school soccer coach father confessed to the murders of two of his students. Papi was sentenced to life in prison, and Dina’s family was harassed and their home vandalized. These days they’re largely shunned by the residents of small-town Millcreek. …
Sofia Mendoza injures her sister (after accidentally-on-purpose tripping her), so her father sends her to Forestjaw to reflect on her behavior. Things get off to a weird start: Monarch, Forestjaw’s leader and seemingly only real adult, greets the campers (or “candidates,” as she calls them) with a terrifying mechanical vulture on her shoulder before confiscating …
Joaquín and his friends Emma and Maya have a “Puerto Rican Ghostbusters vibe” going on. They love hunting for paranormal activity, so they’re excited to hear about a house in their hometown of Jacob’s Barrow, Massachusetts, that’s been vacant since 1997, following the death of one of the family’s children. The trio are determined to …
Fifteen years past college, Emily finds herself horribly unsatisfied. She’s on maternity leave from her ho-hum job, recovering slowly from a difficult childbirth, and feeling increasingly isolated from her husband and friends. She remembers her college roommate, Daisy, as her one true soul mate but, unfortunately, the women lost touch after freshman year, when Daisy …
The novel opens with narrator Jessica Morton, a junior at Helshire College and a member of an age-old crime family, taking Peter, her younger cousin and fellow Helshire student, on a climb—no, not the recreational kind. It’s actually a midnight trek up the school’s tallest building, from which Jessica ensures, at Grandmother’s orders, that Peter …
