Moving from the recent past into the future, Sara Batkie’s short story collection "Better Times" traverses lives that are subtly or drastically twisted away from what is familiar. Mystery and surrealism underlie the mundane, their... Read More

In Mary Watson’s "The Wren Hunt", druids are still in the world, but they’re hanging on by a thread. Once a powerful group, their unity is long gone, victim to internecine factions that have divided their three branches into... Read More

Hilda Eunice Burgos’s "Ana María Reyes Does Not Live in a Castle" is thoughtful and entertaining. Eleven-year-old Ana María is bright, talented, and precocious, the second child in a family with four—soon to be five—children. She... Read More

An unusual mixture of biography, comedy, action, and analysis, "Explosions" takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to one of the most popular but artistically dismissed film directors working today. Mathieu Poulin positions Michael Bay as a... Read More

"The Heart of War" by national policy veteran Kathleen McInnis is part office drama, part foible-filled romp through the US’s military bureaucracy. When Dr. Heather Reilly arrives at the Pentagon to work as an academic fellow, she... Read More

Nick Mullins strikes a resonant emotional chord with the exquisite, melancholic storytelling of his graphic novel This Wasn’t the Plan. The book collects three stories—“Phantom,” “Defrost,” and “Sink”—that channel the... Read More

The rush of a whodunit pales next to Barbara Barrow’s what’ve-they-done-and-why, "The Quelling". The novel instantly achieves page-turner status through vexing questions. Why are two youngsters being raised by television nature... Read More

Ethereal and surreal, Tom Chambers’s photomontages “tell unfinished stories” about childhoods in flux, gasping ecologies, and unfinished fantasies. From his childhood encounters with the Wyeths and a tour in Vietnam, Chambers moved... Read More