In Kyle Richardson’s steampunk adventure "Beast Heart", two children are pushed to their extremes when catlike monsters stalk their city. In the city of Iron Bay, nine-year-old Gabby’s hand turns to smoke. Her mother hires an... Read More

Taras Grescoe’s artful and detailed "Possess the Air" draws on letters, memoirs, and secondary sources to chronicle twenty years of resistance to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Set in Mussolini’s Rome, which lives and breathes... Read More

France’s Louis XIV, known as “The Sun King,” has long been an enigma. On the one hand, he was visionary, practical, and probably the greatest patron of the arts the world has ever known. On the other, he was ruthless, vain,... Read More

Marc Petitjean grew up with Frida Kahlo’s disturbing painting “The Heart” hanging in his living room. As a child, he was terrified of the image of a huge bleeding heart lying in the sand, with its handless woman pierced by a metal... Read More

Vivek Shraya’s "The Subtweet" is a sharp, encompassing story about a creative friendship that’s promoted, and later imploded, by the kinetic energy of Twitter. Contrasting emotional vulnerability and connective need with desires for... Read More

Afghani American Fowzia Karimi immigrated to the US with her family after the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and grew up in Southern California. Negotiating the before and after of that seismic childhood event requires reckoning... Read More

Understanding food as nourishment for mind, body, and soul, Amy Symington’s "The Long Table Cookbook" is a guide to plant-based cooking meant to be enjoyed together. Emphasizing both the physical benefits of plant-based recipes and the... Read More

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel "Starling Days" is a gentle treatise on the anatomy of sadness, wherein the many manifestations of modern melancholy raise questions about what it truly means to be “okay.” Mina wants to silence the... Read More