Quick—what came first, plants or animals? Plants, the common answer once taught as truth, is wrong. Animal life came first, and this is just one of the food-for-thought facts revealed in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s "The Hidden Life... Read More

Agnes Martin got a late start in her art career, struggled with relationships at a time when she couldn’t live openly, dealt with mental illness, and still became an important figure in the art world where her work was a bridge between... Read More

"Wildfire" brings equal measures of science and drama to the issue of combating ever larger, more intense wildland fires. Author Heather Hansen spent eighteen months immersed in fire science and policy, shadowing the elite firefighters... Read More

“The Vanishings went unwitnessed—until the telltale puddle of clothing was found there was no reason to suppose a Vanishing had happened at all.” In Malcolm McNeill’s "The Beginning Woods", adults are disappearing all over the... Read More

A hospitalized girl is roused from a coma, waking to a world where Judgment Day has come and gone. Michelle Rene’s "Tattoo", a novella from a press specializing in the form, juxtaposes postapocalypse with rebirth as old forces revisit... Read More

A disturbing look into how grief makes you susceptible to being taken advantage of, "The Boundless Sublime" is the story of girl who attempts to overcome one tragedy by barreling headlong into another. Mere months after a travesty tears... Read More

“California is a fable. A fantasy. A fiction,” Natalie Singer writes of her adopted home. “A metamorphosis.” So it was for the explorers and prospectors who first clambered over the Sierra to find it; so it remains for every wave... Read More

The history of NASA hinged on a set of predetermined intervals; two seconds were everything. So shows Don Eyles in "Sunburst and Luminary", his account of helping design the guidance systems that led Apollo missions to their successes.... Read More