Teresa Fazio’s shocking memoir "Fidelis" recalls her deployment to Iraq and her stateside return. Fazio, a lieutenant in the US Marines, shares a vivid account of her deployment when she was a naïve twenty-three-year-old. Through her... Read More

In Julian Winters’s perceptive young adult novel, "The Summer of Everything", a gay teenager is afraid of loving his best friend. In Santa Monica, Wes is an insecure, comic book-loving geek. He lives above an independent bookstore, and... Read More

In Faulkner’s Shadow is a lively literary memoir set in Oxford, Mississippi, the hometown of famed novelist William Faulkner. Oxford has produced more writers than most places. There’s competition, Lawrence Wells says, to see who... Read More

In "American Dinosaur Abroad", Dutch historian of paleontology Ilja Nieuwland traces the rise of people’s obsession with dinosaurs by way of a set of plaster diplodocus casts that traveled around the world. The diplodocuses tell the... Read More

California’s history of racist legislation against Black Americans is brought to light in Lynn M. Hudson’s "West of Jim Crow". Attracted by the promise of economic opportunity and freedom from enslavement and Jim Crow, Black... Read More

Dakota McFadzean’s story collection To Know You’re Alive is deliberate, creepy, and wonderful. These stories might be called haunting or disturbing, but that loose description doesn’t do justice to their subtle and graceful... Read More

John McNally’s excellent short story collection "The Fear of Everything" includes nine tales of subtle terror. Beginning with “The Magician,” this book marks its territory: it specializes in a kind of removed, intellectual suburban... Read More

In Nancy Boyarsky’s chilling London mystery, The Entitled, American PI Nicole Graves must clear a teenage murder suspect. Nicole is tasked with bringing home Abigail, an entitled beauty whose view of her wealthy, adoptive parents... Read More