Sharon Dilworth’s "To Be Marquette" is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about a woman’s freshman year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 1970s, Molly chooses a college in Marquette to escape the freeways and factories of her... Read More

A troubled prosecutor reconsiders her definition of justice in Simone Buchholz’s thriller "The Kitchen". During a sweltering Hamburg summer, garbage bags filled with body parts keep turning up in the bay. Riley, the public prosecutor,... Read More

African identities are diverse in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s haunting, award-winning collection "Japa and Other Stories". Japa is both noun and verb, identity and a place in the mind. Japa children escape Nigeria to far-flung continents,... Read More

Jennifer Heath’s fabulistic short story collection "The Jewel and the Ember" celebrates love as it’s found in ancient texts. Inspired by Golden Age cinema, including Samson and Delilah, and by the idea of love itself, Heath retells... Read More

Dianna E. Anderson’s "Body Phobia" is a convincing personal and philosophical exposé of how a culture that fears bodily differences harms vulnerable people. Anderson, who is nonbinary, trans, and queer, grew up in an evangelical... Read More

In Michael Weingrad’s slim, nostalgic literary novel "Eugene Nadelman", a nerdy Jewish boy comes of age in 1980s Philadelphia. Eugene shares his first name, and the book its format, with Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene... Read More

Tim Allis’s fascinating biography of American fashion and retail pioneer Henri Bendel, inventor of the clearance sale, asserts that much of what is taken for granted in modern retail can be attributed to Bendel, whose in-store fashion... Read More

In Renée D. Bondy’s historical novel about clerical sexual abuse, "[non]disclosure", a survivor finds the courage to tell her story. As a girl at a Catholic school, the unnamed narrator is taught that the reward for confession is no... Read More