Heidi von Palleske’s peculiar "Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack" is a novel in which nothing is incidental and aberrations abound. The audience is required, from the get-go, to do some of the driving in this story; the reader’s... Read More

The inner world of a sick, antagonistic young man is the compelling focus of Aziz Mohammed’s novel, The Critical Case of a Man Called K. Narrated in direct, plain language, the book delves into the unsettled mind of a young man who is... Read More

Dario Diofebi’s novel "Paradise, Nevada" is as sprawling and colorful as its setting: the Las Vegas Strip, a four-mile-long cluster of hotels and casinos that attracts millions of tourists and gamblers from around the world. The main... Read More

In Jim Lewis’s wondrous novel "Ghosts of New York", encounters among strangers result in unexpected relationships, and a montage that celebrates a city of manifold graces. Lewis’s observant, gradual stories are linked by recurrent... Read More

Whitney Collins’s layered short story collection "Big Bad" concerns the dark impulses that lurk within. In the ingenious cautionary tale “Big Bad,” a woman gives birth to progressively wiser iterations of herself. In the... Read More

In Kaitlyn Greenidge’s powerful coming-of-age novel "Libertie", a freeborn Black girl’s hunger to define her own boundaries carries her across an ocean and back. The darker daughter of a light-skinned, widowed homeopath, Libertie... Read More

Told through the voices of strong, albeit fractured, women across generations, "The Seed Keeper" is a novel about legacies, generational trauma, and the inescapable call of one’s roots. Rosalie’s mother died when she was four. She... Read More

In Amanda Dennis’s melancholy literary novel "Her Here", a wounded graduate student translates the story of a fellow wanderer. Since her mother died, Elena has shuddered her way through daily existence. She’s assigned herself new... Read More