Sympathy is created for these disparate and complex characters in a way that is worth savoring. Set in the late 1990s, Heather Bell Adams’s Marantha Road takes a seemingly standard setup of Southern poverty literature and burnishes it... Read More

Mounting tensions make this psychological thriller hard to put down. Sarah Stovell’s "Exquisite" is a dark, sensual, and twisted character study, rife with murky motivations and sinister revelations. Best-selling author Bo Luxton has... Read More

Organized into roughly contiguous “lectures,” "Facing Gaia" is an unusual and academic examination of climate change and humanity’s place in nature. In contrast to many other emotional, urgent, and even panicky examples of... Read More

In this sweet romance, author Kate Watson explores family, obligations, and the weight of the past. "Seeking Mansfield" is about one young girl’s journey to discover her own desires after suppressing them for so long. Sixteen-year-old... Read More

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept,” explains the Skin Horse in the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit.... Read More

"Body Horror" is an incredible, touching, intelligent collection that looks beyond what’s comfortable to examine what is true. By turns tender, insightful, and sharp as a scalpel, Anne Elizabeth Moore’s essays in Body Horror... Read More

Let’s say you bought yourself a fancy movie theater back in the 1930s. You probably knew how to make popcorn and tear tickets, but you might not have been prepared to design newspaper ads, often on a daily basis, to get butts into the... Read More

This contemporary romance has dimension and depth. "Beneath the Stars", Lynn Charles’s wonderful contemporary romance novel, connects the dots between unlikely lovers Sid and Eddie as they try to mesh their lives’ eccentric orbits.... Read More