Margaret Ford was married to Derek, who died a few months ago of cancer. She now lives alone in an English village not far from Tunbridge Wells and struggles to connect with her friends and neighbors, especially now that her spouse, the father of her only child and touchstone of her life, is gone. Readers …
“At home, I was the center of everything.” Wild Princess has it good and knows it. The words “She showered me with attention” are paired with an image of a pair of peach-colored human hands with painted fingernails giving Wild Princess a beauty treatment. One day some cardboard boxes appear, and “then the suitcases came …
Potchky, a ring-tailed lemur, is a fussy eater; pal Nosh, a koala, is a more willing gourmet. Nosh wants to make latkes (Potchky: “What are latkes?” Nosh: “Yummy potato pancakes”) but Potchky whines: “The only potatoes I like are potato chips.” Potchky agrees to help Nosh prepare the treats but objects to the color of …
In the opening author’s note, Guralnick quotes novelist Lee Smith: “I have always felt that I can tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction.” This hints that his 11 stories illuminate emotional truth and depth of feeling more than autobiographical fact. Proceeding from coming-of-age awkwardness through middle-aged angst, they generally present a young white …
Bobb has been immersed in STEM education at Georgia Tech, Google, and the National Science Foundation. He weaves together the many threads of race, technology, and American history, alongside his own personal history as an immigrant son of Guyana, to clarify the stakes for Blacks as we enter an AI-dominated world. From school segregation to …
As the story opens, 12-year-old Dylan Dearborne is yearning for a bit of permanence. She and her mother, Maggie, are living in Springfield, Oregon, in the early 1980s with a nice, decent man named Joe and his teen daughter, Anna. Maggie’s been wandering aimlessly with Dylan for years (“She’d been shuffled from one place to …
It’s 2023, and it’s been two weeks since Beatrice Carter awoke from seizure-induced unconsciousness, and she still has no idea who she is. The only identification on her person was a gym membership card, and even then, she’s unsure if the name on the ID is truly hers, as a police search yielded no results: …
The struggle for belonging and self-acceptance drives this Midwestern family’s mini-dramas in the 2010s. The humorously upbeat narrative alternates between the third-person perspectives of three generations of Jewish women: Mona Grossman, her teenage daughter Grace, and Mona’s grandmother, Esther “Bubby” Rosenfeld. Mona, a full-time homemaker, struggles to reconnect with Grace, and to save her marriage …
The title refers to lists readers are encouraged to make, which become the basis for the stimulating exercises, games, and prompts, organized in six chapters. Hendrix approaches the topic with a rare mixture of wit, sound advice, and philosophical musings, building to a work that’s far more than the sum of its parts. He establishes …
Hunter Long, a former professional boxer, has worked hard to make his own way at the CIA, despite constant comparisons between his own career and that of his late grandfather, an agency legend. Hunter receives a classified briefing one day and learns that a notorious Russian operative, Victor Chernov, is actually a double agent who’s …
