How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.
 

Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days (a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award), a founding editor of The Believer, and a former editor at the Poetry Foundation. His writing has appeared most recently in Lapham's Quarterly and on the Criterion website, and he is a graphic novel columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

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In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we communicate but who we are and who we can be. It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don’t participate, that is how we participate—but by which we’re continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought us online and what keeps us there even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic, powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t been told.

Joanne McNeil was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation, and she has contributed to Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired, among other publications. Lurking is her first book.

Sonia Saraiya is Vanity Fair's television critic, covering narrative media and how it intersects with technology, politics, and history.

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A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend—and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community.

Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories—and at what cost.

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

 

Evan James is the author of the essay collection I've Been Wrong Before and the novel Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe, both published by Atria Books.

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An empowering and educational alphabet picture book about women artists, perfect for fans of Rad American Women A-Z.

How many women artists can you name? From Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe, to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Xenobia Bailey, this lushly illustrated alphabet picture book presents both famous and underrepresented women in the fine arts from a variety of genres: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and more. Each spread features a simple line of text encapsulating the creator's iconic work in one word, such as "D is for Dots" (Yayoi Kusama) and "S is for Spider" (Louise Bourgeois), followed by slightly longer text about the artist for older readers who would like to know more. Backmatter includes photos, extended biographies, and discussion questions for budding creatives and trailblazers.

Artists featured: Mirka Mora, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yayoi Kusama, Kay Sage, Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Elizabeth Catlett, Judith Leyster, Leonora Carrington, Carmen Herrera, Edmonia Lewis, Maya Lin, Hilma af Klint, Maria Martinez, Gee's Bend quilters, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Loïs Mailou Jones, Alice Neel, Helen Zughaib, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Dorothea Lange, Xenobia Bailey, and Maria Sibylla Merian.

Melanie LaBarge is a writer living in Upstate New York with her partner, Shane, and her son, Julian. She holds a BA and MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her favorite color is yellow and her favorite museum is MoMA. Women Artists A to Z is her first children’s book.

Caroline Corrigan is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. She works out of her home studio in Upstate New York, where she lives with her husband, Harrison, and their son, Graham. Her favorite color is blue and her favorite museum is Musée d’Orsay. Women Artists A to Z is her first children’s book.

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When the neighborhood boys tell CeCe that she can't be a pirate, she goes straight to her Grandpa, who must know something about being a pirate. Why else would he have all those tattoos?

As Grandpa shares each tattoo with CeCe, they are transported to imaginative lands where they learn all the qualities a pirate should possess: A pirate must be BRAVE and QUICK, but also FUN and INDEPENDENT. And the most important thing is to believe in yourself, whether you’re a pirate or not.
 

Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, and BuzzFeed News’ Twitter morning show #AMtoDM, Isaac appears frequently on The Today Show and is the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes). How to Be a Pirate, illustrated by Brigette Barrager, is his first picture book.

Brigette Barrager is an award-winning artist, character designer, illustrator and writer of children's books, best known for illustrating the best-selling Uni the Unicorn. Brigette earned a degree in Character Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, where she now teaches. She is always in search of stories that are both emotionally resonant and whimsical. Brigette lives and works in Los Angeles with her handsome husband Sean, a grumpy little dog, and two rascally gray kitties. www.brigetteb.com • @missbrigette (Instagram)

Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, educator, activist, mentor, and curator. She has published several books of poetry, and she is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO's Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, and Director of BLM@Pratt Programming, and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country.

Jon Scieszka is the creator of Trucktown, including the New York Times bestselling Smash, Crash!, and the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, Caldecott Honor Book The Stinky Cheese Man, and many other books that inspire kids to want to read. He has worked as an elementary school teacher and is the founder of GuysRead.com, a literacy initiative for boys.

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When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, “just naturally reverent,” a fact that didn’t change when she—much to her own confusion—lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: “You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé.”

 

A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner’s work. Her celebrated essay “Thin Places” (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?

 

Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author’s past and present preoccupations.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of Thin Places, which will be published on March 3 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her essays have appeared in n+1, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, and others. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and selected for residencies by PioneerWorks, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art OMI. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Molly Fischer is a writer at New York Magazine and The Cut. Previously, she hosted the podcast "The Cut on Tuesdays."

 

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Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.

With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Omotara James is the author of Daughter Tongue. She has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, The Recluse, Nat.Brut, Winter Tangerine, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere, including various anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and edits poetry for American Chordata.

 

Molly Tolsky is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She's the founder and editor of Alma (heyalma.com) and senior editor of No Tokens. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in print and online at Tin House, Hayden's Ferry Review, Electric Literature, Modern Loss, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine and elsewhere. You can follow her at @mollytolsky and visit her website at mollytolsky.com. 

 

Anne-E. Wood's fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Tin House, New Letters, No Tokens, Agni, Gargoyle, and many others. She was a Yaddo fellow, and she teaches writing at Rutgers University and at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.

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Judy never intended to start wearing the dog. But when she stumbled across her son Teddy’s old baby sling during a halfhearted basement cleaning, something in her snapped. So: the dog went into the sling, Judy felt connected to another living being, and she’s repeated the process every day since.

Life hasn’t gone according to Judy’s plan. Her career as a children’s book author offered a glimpse of success before taking an embarrassing nose dive. Teddy, now a teenager, treats her with some combination of mortification and indifference. Her best friend is dying. And her husband, Gary, has become a pot-addled professional “snackologist” who she can’t afford to divorce. On top of it all, she has a painfully ironic job writing articles for a self-help website—a poor fit for someone seemingly incapable of helping herself.

Laura Zigman is the author of Animal Husbandry (which was made into the movie Someone Like You, starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd), Dating Big Bird, Piece of Work, and Her. She has been a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post, produced a popular online series of animated videos called Annoying Conversations, and was the recipient of a Yaddo residency. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, son, and deeply human Sheltie.

After attending NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and interning at Late Night with David Letterman, Julie Klam went on to write for such publications as O: The Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, and for the VH1 television show Pop-Up Video, where she earned an Emmy nomination. Currently she writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the magazines that haven't folded. She is the author of Please Excuse My Daughter, You Had Me At Woof, Love At First Bark, Friendkeeping and The Stars in Our Eyes all with Riverhead Books. Her sixth book is coming out in 2021 and it will have a title by then. She lives in New York City.

Ann Leary is the bestselling author of the novels, THE CHILDREN, THE GOOD HOUSE, OUTTAKES FROM A MARRIAGE, and the memoir, AN INNOCENT, A BROAD. Her novel, THE GOOD HOUSE, has been adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. It will be released in 2020.  Ann’s New York Times essay, “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” was adapted for the Amazon Modern Love TV Series and stars Tina Fey and John Slattery. She is currently working on a new novel and a collection of essays for Simon and Schuster. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and she has written for numerous publications. Ann and her husband Denis Leary live in New York.

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In the coastal town of Danvers, MA, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with ’80s iconography—from Heathers to “big hair”—Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective journeys of this enchanted team as they storm their way to the championship. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza, whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all, the DHS Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.
 

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of three other novels The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, this very bookstore. 

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In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.

The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he’s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A regular contributor to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their son.
 

Kate Bolick is the author of the best-selling Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own. She is a frequent contributor to various publications, including The Atlantic, Bookforum, and The New York Times, and she teaches writing at Columbia and New York University.

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A pair of activity books to inspire bonding between parents and kids

 

You, Me, We! is a set of fill-in books that give parents and children an opportunity to express themselves and connect with each other in the process. Filled with activities that appeal to the kid and the kid-at-heart, these identical books are designed so that a parent and child can capture memories, share interests, and collaborate on silliness at the same time! Created by Erin Jang (@theindigobunting) and kid-tested by her son Miles, these boldly designed books are gender-neutral and written for moms, dads, sons, and daughters alike. They are ideal for taking on vacation, breaking out on a rainy day, or doing a page at a time as a nightly ritual. An easy way to capture the parent-child relationship at a moment in time, You, Me, We! will become a treasure in the making.

 

Erin Jang is a graphic designer and illustrator living in New York City. She works on a wide range of creative projects in her studio, The Indigo Bunting, including work for The New York Times, Apple, Google, Bon Appétit, Chronicle Books and Paperless Post. She co-authored the craft book, Make & Give, and most recently illustrated Little Learners, the latest board book series from Mudpuppy. She worked as an art director for publications such as Esquire and Martha Stewart Living and was the founding design director for Color Factory (SF and NYC). You, Me, We! was a special collaboration with her 8-year-old son, Miles. You can find more of her work at theindigobunting.com and @theindigobunting.

 

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What do you do when it is time to go to bed, but you have toes that are too wiggly, feet that want to run, hips that want to shake, legs that want to jump, and a heart that wants to drum? Good night, Wiggly toes is a fun book that helps you to connect with your wiggle body and helps calm it down.

One breath a time.

Roda Ahmed is a Norwegian author and columnist born in Hargeisa, Somalia. Roda is the bestselling author of Forberedelsen (The Preparations) and in 2018 she published her first bestselling children's book Mae Among the Stars with HarperCollins. An Amazon Best Book of the Month. Now in 11th printing! She can speak five languages: Somali, Arabic, Norwegian, English, and French. Roda is the Founder and CEO of Hightree Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. For more info check out instagram:  @rodaworld

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In her most personal and inspiring book yet, the beloved speaker, philanthropist, activist, and author explores the wild joy we discover when we stop trying to be good for others and start living true to ourselves.

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside every woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good mothers, daughters, partners, employees, citizens, and friends. We believe all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives, relationships, and world, and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful. We hide our simmering discontent—even from ourselves. Until we reach our boiling point.
Four years ago, Glennon Doyle—bestselling Oprah-endorsed author, renowned activist and humanitarian, wife and mother of three—was speaking at a conference when a woman entered the room. Glennon looked at her and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. Soon she realized that they came to her from within.

Glennon was finally hearing her own voice—the voice that had been silenced by decades of cultural conditioning, numbing addictions, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl Glennon had been before the world told her who to be. She vowed to never again abandon herself. She decided to build a life of her own—one based on her individual desire, intuition, and imagination. She would reclaim her true, untamed self.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both a memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It offers a piercing, electrifying examination of the restrictive expectations women are issued from birth; shows how hustling to meet those expectations leaves women feeling dissatisfied and lost; and reveals that when we quit abandoning ourselves and instead abandon the world’s expectations of us, we become women who can finally look at our lives and recognize: There She Is.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

This event will be held at St. Ann's Church at 157 Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights. All tickets are seated, and every ticket includes 1 copy of Untamed.  Doors open at 6:15pm.
 

New York City is still regaining its balance in the years following 9/11, when four twenty-somethings—Tess, Tazio, David, and Angelica—meet in a bar, each yearning for something: connection, recognition, a place in the world, a cause to believe in. Nearly fifteen years later, as their city recalibrates in the wake of the 2016 election, their bond has endured—but almost everything else has changed.

As freshmen at Cooper Union, Tess and Tazio were the ambitious, talented future of the art world—but by thirty-six, Tess is married to David, the mother of two young boys, and working as an understudy on Broadway. Kind and steady, David is everything Tess lacked in her own childhood—but a recent freak accident has left him with befuddling symptoms, and she’s still adjusting to her new role as caretaker.

Meanwhile, Tazio—who once had a knack for earning the kind of attention that Cooper Union students long for—has left the art world for a career in creative branding and politics. But in December 2016, fresh off the astonishing loss of his candidate, Tazio is adrift, and not even his gorgeous and accomplished fiancée, Angelica, seems able to get through to him. With tensions rising on the national stage, the four friends are forced to face the reality of their shared histories, especially a long-ago betrayal that has shaped every aspect of their friendship.

Brian Platzer has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.

Susan Chira is editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. Chira worked for The New York Times from 1981 to 2019 as a reporter and editor, including posts as foreign editor and deputy executive editor, overseeing daily news coverage across The Times. As senior correspondent on gender issues, she was a member of the team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of sexual harassment.

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Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company’s sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he’s nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech start-up’s user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret—and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo’s computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her secret online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend.

With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider’s knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and start-up culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know each other? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world?

Kevin Nguyen is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He teaches at Vassar College. His first book, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, was published in 2015. He is currently a fellow the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.

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This is NOT a history book.

This is a book about the here and now.

A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.

A book about race.

 

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas--and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.

 

Jason Reynolds is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including When I Was the Greatest, Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), Long Way Down, and Look Both Ways. He is a National Book Award finalist; the recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and multiple Coretta Scott King Honors; and the winner of a Kirkus Prize, two Walter Dean Myers Awards, and an NAACP Image Award, among other honors. He lives in Washington, D.C and invites you to visit him online at JasonWritesBooks.com.

 

Ibram X. Kendi is the New York Times bestselling author of Stamped from the Beginning, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and How to be an Antiracist. He is a professor of history and international relations and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. One of America's leading antiracist voices and a frequent public speaker, Dr. Kendi is also a columnist at The Atlantic. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. He invites you to visit him online at IbramXKendi.com.
 

Considered one of the richest and most irreverent biographies in history, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein in the style and voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Published in 1933 and narrated by Alice, this autobiography begins with her initial move to France in 1907, the day after which she meets Gertrude, sparking a relationship that lasts for nearly four decades. Recounting the vibrant and literary life the two make for themselves among the Parisian avant-garde, Alice opens the doors to the prominent salons they held in their home at rue de Fleurus, hosting fellow expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound as well as artists Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Man Ray, and speaks of the twilight of the Paris belle époque.

In this edition, the wildly talented Maira Kalman brings this glittering Parisian world to life, and celebrates Stein and Toklas in vivid color. Her whimsical and inimitable illustrations complement the wit and humor of Stein’s narrative, and elevate the exciting intrigues of these famous women and their friends. Inviting readers to experience this book in a completely new way, the illustrated edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas will prompt a contemporary reading of this cherished and singular classic.

Maira Kalman is an illustrator, author, and designer. She is the author of Beloved Dog, And the Pursuit of Happiness and The Principles of Uncertainty. She is the illustrator of Michael Pollan's Food Rules and the bestselling edition of William Strunk and E. B. White's The Elements of Style. Kalman's work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan.
 

Françoise Mouly has been the art editor at The New Yorker since 1993, where she has overseen more than thirteen hundred covers. Many of these have been named cover of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). She's also the editorial director of TOON Books, the publishing house of comics for children she founded in 2008, which pioneered the field of comics for early readers and received numerous awards and prizes. Ms. Mouly was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and a Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government. Since 2014, she has been nominated four times for the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. In 2015, Ms. Mouly received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for her work in Education. In 2017, Ms. Mouly began publishing RESIST!, a collection of comics and graphics primarily by women, coedited with her daughter, writer Nadja Spiegelman.

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Eighteen boyfriends, twenty-three jobs, and one ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice: Temporary casts a hilarious and tender eye toward the struggle for happiness under late capitalism.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Hilary Leichter’s writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever, Friendship, and the forthcoming Perfect Tunes. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.

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He’s a tall man who likes to fix things. She’s a small mouse who likes to find things. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

On a tall hill, in a tall house, live a tall man and a small mouse. All day the man does tall things, like untangling swings and rescuing cats from trees. All night the mouse does small things, like finding pins and pens, corks and long-lost forks. The two never see each other until the day the mouse takes a snooze in the man’s long shoes…SQUEAK! EEK! Can this duo get along — and maybe even become the perfect mix? A rhythmic, rhyming narration pairs with charming illustrations to celebrate the tall and short of an unlikely friendship — and the surprising benefits of working together.

Mara Bergman is the author of more than twenty books for young children, including Snip Snap! What’s That?, which won a Parents Choice Award, a Society of Illustrators Award and the Stockport Children’s Book Award (UK), as well as Oliver Who Travelled Far and Wide, winner of the Booktrust Early Years Award (UK). Mara was born in NYC and lived in Cobble Hill before moving to England, where she works in London as an editor of children’s books. Mara also writes poetry, and her first full collection, The Disappearing Room, was published last year by Arc Publications (UK). She enjoys swimming, walking her dog, eggplant and hot chocolate (but not together) and was born on leap year day. 

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When the babysitter is unable to come, Daniel is woken out of bed and joins his parents as they head downtown for their jobs as nighttime office cleaners. But the story is about more than brooms, mops, and vacuums. Mama and Papa turn the deserted office building into a magnificent kingdom filled with paper. Then they weave a fantasy of dragons and kings to further engage their reluctant companion—and even encourage him to one day be the king of a paper kingdom.

 

The Paper Kingdom expresses the joy and spirit of a loving family who turn a routine and ordinary experience into something much grander. Magical art by Pascal Campion shows both the real world and the fantasy through the eyes of the young narrator.

 

Helena Ku Rhee grew up in Los Angeles, and has lived in various parts of the United States, Asia, and Europe. Helena works at a movie studio by day, and dreams up story ideas in her spare time. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is also the author of THE TURTLE SHIP, and the forthcoming SORA’S SEASHELLS.

 

Pascal Campion is a prolific French-American illustrator and visual development artist whose clients include DreamWorks Animation, Paramount Pictures, Disney Feature, Disney Toons, Cartoon Network, Hulu, and PBS. He has worked in the animation industry for more than 15 years. His art was featured on the January 6, 2020 cover of The New Yorker. 

 

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A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett’s More Than Organs questions "whatever wholeness means” for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay “the choreography of loss” after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family’s culinary history. Barrett works "to build / a shelter // of / everyone / [they] meet,” from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.

 

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. K. has featured at The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, The Poetry Foundation, The Poetry Project, Princeton University, Tucson Poetry Festival, NY Poetry Festival, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & Brooklyn Museum. They received fellowships & residencies from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, The Home School, Macondo, Drunken Boat, and Monson Arts. Their contributions are in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Asian American Literary Review, them., PBS News Hour, The Advocate, NYLON, Huffington Post, Raceforward, Apogee, VIDA Review, and more. They have two books: When The Chant Comes (Topside, 2016) and More ThanOrgans (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). Kaybarrett.net

 

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in the New Yorker, Harper's, The Believer, and elsewhere. Martin is Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. 

 

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It’s been twenty-seven days since Cleo and Layla’s friendship imploded.

Nearly a month since Cleo realized they’ll never be besties again.

Now Cleo wants to erase every memory, good or bad, that tethers her to her ex-best friend. But pretending Layla doesn’t exist isn’t as easy as Cleo hoped, especially after she’s assigned to be Layla’s tutor. Despite budding friendships with other classmates—and a raging crush on a gorgeous boy named Dom—Cleo’s turbulent past with Layla comes back to haunt them both.

Alternating between time lines of Then and Now, When You Were Everything blends past and present into an emotional story about the beauty of self-forgiveness, the promise of new beginnings, and the courage it takes to remain open to love.

Ashley Woodfolk has loved reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA English and currently works in children's book publishing. She wrote her first book, The Beauty That Remains, from a sunny Brooklyn apartment where she lives with her cute husband and her cuter dog. When You Were Everything is her second novel. Find her online at ashleywoodfolk.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @AshWrites

Kristina Forest is the author of I Wanna Be Where You Are and the forthcoming Now That I’ve Found You. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Writing for Children at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with two huge bookshelves. 

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Please join us as the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon presents a special Womxn’s Herstory Month reading with writers Janel Cloyd, JP Howard, Pamela L. Laskin, Cynthia Manick, and Pamela Sneed!

Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon (WWBPS) is a Literary Salon Series modeled after traveling Salons, popular during the Harlem Renaissance. Poet and author JP Howard has curated and nurtured the SALON for almost nine years. We are a forum offering writers, especially women, of all levels, a venue to come together in a positive and supportive space. WWBPS has a large LGBTQ POC membership and is open to all. JP has been the recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) grants for the Brooklyn-based portion of the Salon Series from 2014 through 2019. The Salon has been featured in Literary Hub, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bryant Park Word for Word Reading Series, CUNY TV's Study With the Best cable tv show, and more.  Follow Bloom on Twitter and Instagram @WomenWriteBloom. 

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When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?

Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one’s self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn’t be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door, Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.

Paul Lisicky is the author of the forthcoming memoir Later: My Life At the Edge of the World (Graywolf, March 2020), as well as The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors' Choice), Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he has served on the Writing Committee since 2000. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. 

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The latest installment in the Welcome to Night Vale universe is the story of the familiar and terrifying Faceless Old Woman. Her story is told in eerie flashbacks that reveal her initially idyllic and then tragic childhood on a Mediterranean estate in the early 19th century, her rise in the criminal underworld of Europe, a nautical adventure with a mysterious organization of smugglers, her plot for revenge on the ones who have betrayed her, and ultimately the story that continues after her death as her spirit travels for decades through the world until settling in modern Night Vale.

 

Interspersed throughout the Woman’s history, readers follow a present day story in Night Vale, as the Faceless Old Woman haunts, guides, and sabotages a man called Craig. In the end, the story of her current day dealings with Craig and her swashbuckling life story in 19th century Europe will come together in the most unexpected and horrifying way.

 

Part The Haunting of Hill House, part The Count of Monte Cristo, and 100% about a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

 

Joseph Fink created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts. He lives with his wife in the Hudson River Valley and Los Angeles.  He is the author of the novel Alice Isn’t Dead.  Jeffrey Cranor co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also co-creates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York. Together, they are the authors of the New York Times best-selling novels Welcome to Night Vale, It Devours!, and four Welcome to Night Vale episode script books: Mostly Void, Partially Stars, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, The Buying of Lot 37, and Who’s a Good Boy?   In 2016, Fink and Cranor announced their podcast network “Night Vale Presents” which has produced 14 original fiction and non-fiction podcasts. For more on Welcome to Night Vale, upcoming events, and the books, visit: www.welcometonightvale.com

Mara Wilson, known for her childhood roles in Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles. Recently, she has appeared on Welcome to Night Vale, Broad City and Bojack Horseman. Her writing has appeared on Elle.com, McSweeney’s, Reductress, and Cracked. She also publishes a newsletter of her writing with Substack, 'Shan't We Call the Vicar?' which can be found at http://mara.substack.com. Mara's first book, Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame is available from Penguin Random House.

 

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I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles.

 

We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson’s life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted. But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys—falling in love, becoming a mother—she turns her gaze outward. She delves into history, art, literature, and music, plotting the intimate experience of life in a women’s body across a wide-ranging map. From Nick Cave to Taylor Swift, Botticelli to Frida Kahlo, Louisa May Alcott to Lucy Grealy, Constellations is an investigation into the different ways of seeing, both uniquely personal and universal in its resonances.

 

Sinéad Gleeson is a writer, editor and freelance broadcaster. She has been published in Granta, among many other places, and is the editor of three award-winning short anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers. Previously, Gleeson presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio One in Ireland. She currently lives in Dublin.

 

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

 

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Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.

 

Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.

 

Harry Dodge is a writer and visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally. His solo and collaborative work is held in numerous institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Hammer Museum, LA; and Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. In 2017 Dodge was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

 

Darcey Steinke is the author of the New York Times Notable memoir Easter Everywhere, as well as five novels. In 2017 Maggie Nelson wrote a foreword for a new edition of Suicide Blonde. With Rick Moody, she edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (Little, Brown 1997). Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared widely. Her web-story Blindspot was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been both a Henry Hoyns and a Stegner Fellow; Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi; and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, The American University of Paris, and Princeton. Flash Count Diary is her most recent book.

 

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The name of the elite, women-only coworking space stretches across the wall behind the check-in desk: THE HERD, the H-E-R always in purple. In-the-know New Yorkers crawl over each other to apply for membership to this community that prides itself on mentorship and empowerment. Among the hopefuls is Katie Bradley, who’s just returned from the Midwest after a stint of book research blew up in her face. Luckily, Katie has an “in,” thanks to her sister Hana, an original Herder and the best friend of Eleanor Walsh, its charismatic founder.

Eleanor is a queen among The Herd’s sun-filled rooms, admired and quietly feared, even as she strives to be warm and approachable. As head of PR, Hana is working around the clock in preparation for a huge announcement from Eleanor—one that would change the trajectory of The Herd forever. Though Katie loves her sister’s crew, she secretly hopes she’s found her next book subject in Eleanor, who’s brilliant, trailblazing—and extremely private.

Then, on the night of the glitzy Herd news conference, Eleanor vanishes without a trace. Everybody has a theory about what made Eleanor run, but when the police suspect foul play, everyone is a suspect: Eleanor’s husband, other Herders, the men’s rights groups that have had it out for The Herd since its launch—even Eleanor’s closest friends. As Hana struggles to figure out what her friend was hiding and Katie chases the story of her life, the sisters must face down the secrets they’re keeping from each other—and confront just how dangerous it can be when women’s perfect veneers start to crack, crumble, and then fall away all together.

Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author of The Lost Night. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among other titles.

Andrea Stanley is a features director at Cosmopolitan. Previously, she was an editor at Seventeen. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Marie Claire, the Chicago Tribune, and various other publications. 

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Books Are Magic is proud to host the (NYRB) Books Are Magic Book Club, a book club that discusses a different book by a female author in the New York Review Books catalog every other month.

 

This month we are discussing Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz. 

 

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

 

Eve Babitz is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. Her novel Eve’s Hollywood is published by NYRB Classics.

 

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Believer. She is the author of Hollywood's Eve and lives in New York City with her husband and two small sons.

 

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Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell’s heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan’s office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan’s elegance, success, and spiritual force.

 

Surrounded by Nell’s ex, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and Joan’s buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.

 

Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.

 

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker online, among others. She is a graduate of Yale and the NYU MFA program, and has received a Wallant Award for Jewish Literature. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire.

 

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A groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears the worst. But Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story the stuff of legends.

 

Sharks in the Time of Saviors follows Noa’s family as they struggle amid the collapsing sugarcane industry. They hail his rescue as a sign of the favor of ancient Hawaiian gods—a belief that appears reinforced by Noa’s puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor drives the family apart: Noa, now working as a paramedic in gritty Oregon neighborhoods, attempts to fathom his expanding abilities; farther north, in Washington, his older brother Dean, becoming obsessed with wealth and fame, hurtles into the world of elite college athletics; while in California, risk-addicted younger sister Kaui navigates unforgiving academic and wilderness landscapes to forge her independence from the family’s legacy.

 

When supernatural events revisit the Flores household in Hawai‘i—this time with tragic consequences—everyone must reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

 

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.  

 

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Kilmer Watts makes his living teaching piano lessons, but when automatic pianos arrive in town, he realizes he’s out of a job. He spots a “Help Wanted” sign at the poem factory and decides to investigate — he’s always been curious about how poems are made.

 

The foreman explains that machines and assembly lines are used for poetry these days. So Kilmer learns how to operate the “meter meter” and empty the “cliché bins.” He assembles a poem by picking out a rhyme scheme, sprinkling in some similes and adding alliteration.

 

But one day the machines malfunction, and there is a dramatic explosion at the poem factory. How will poetry ever survive?

 

Kyle Lukoff’s funny story, rich in wordplay, is complemented by Mark Hoffmann’s lively, quirky art. The backmatter includes definitions of poetic feet, types of poems (with illustrated examples) and a glossary of other terms. An author’s note explains the inspiration for the story.

 

Kyle Lukoff has worked at the intersection of books and people for more than half his life, first as a bookseller and later as a school librarian, reviewer, awards juror and contributor to professional publications. His first picture book, A Storytelling of Ravens, illustrated by Natalie Nelson, received two starred reviews and his second, When Aidan Became a Brother was described as "joyful and affirming" in a Kirkus starred review and has received three other starred reviews. A confirmed bachelor, Kyle lives in a Brooklyn apartment filled with books.

 

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It's a busy morning in the city. Yotam and his mom stop in at their local café on the way to school, tying their dog's leash to an outside chair as usual. But today isn't usual. Bailey the dog gets startled by something and is suddenly dashing down Henry Street, freed of her leash and frantic. Before Yotam can catch up with her, she has disappeared. And that's when lots of neighbors get involved, joining in the search for the missing dog and offering all kinds of support and love.

 

This bright, energetic book is inspired by a true Brooklyn story of strangers rallying to help their neighbor. It's a rousing, feel-good animal adventure for the picture book audience, and a portrait of community at its best and kindest.

 

Amy Sohn’s Brooklyn novels, Prospect Park West and Motherland, were international successes and made her an icon of the New Brooklyn. She is also the author of The Actress, Run Catch Kiss, and My Old Man. A New York City native, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and their dog Luna.

 

Orna Le Pape is a psychotherapist in private practice. She lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her sons, and with Bailey.

 

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Before Quinn Ryan was in love with Jamie Rudawski, she loved Jamie Rudawski, who was her best friend. But when Jamie dumps Quinn a month before their senior year, Quinn is suddenly girlfriend-less and best friend-less.

 

Enter a new crush: Ruby Ocampo, the gorgeous and rich lead singer of the popular band Sweets, who’s just broken up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Quinn’s always only wanted to be with Jamie, but if Jamie no longer wants to be with her, why can’t Quinn go all in on Ruby? But the closer Quinn grows to Ruby, the more she misses Jamie, and the more (she thinks) Jamie misses her. Who says your first love can’t be your second love, too?

 

Katie Heaney is the author of the memoirs Never Have I Ever and Would You Rather?, and the novels Dear Emma and Public Relations. She is a senior health writer at the Cut, and you can find her on Twitter at @KTHeaney.

 

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Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him.

After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled?

Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her.

On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself.

And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.

VERONICA ROTH is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide), and many short stories and essays.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

 

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

 

Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O magazine,and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

 

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

 

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The conclusion of the hilarious and heartwarming graphic novel duology about Bitty, the figure skater turned collegiate hockey player who finds the love of his life and friendships of a lifetime during his time on the Samwell University hockey team.

 

Bitty is heading to junior year of college and though he has overcome his fear of getting "checked" on the ice, he and Jack now face new challanges. They must nagivate their new relationship while being apart and also decide how they want to reveal their relationship to those around them. Not only that, but Jack and the Falconers are now a big part of the NHL—and Bitty's life! It's a hockey season filled with victories and losses.

 

Ngozi Ukazu is the creator of Check, Please!, a massively popular online graphic novel. She graduated from Yale University in 2013 and received a master's in sequential art in 2015 from the Savannah College of Art and Design. While she used her intensive knowledge of ice hockey to launch Check, Please! in 2013, Ngozi has a deep interest in sports that ranges from half-marathon training to basketball documentaries. Ngozi also cites '90s sitcoms as a major influence in the quirky, found-family feel of Check, Please!  

Tiffany Babb is an essayist, comics critic, and poet. She reads and then she writes and then she talks about what she has read and written. Find her comics criticism in PanelxPanel Magazine, Women Write About Comics, Shelfdust, and the MNT. Find her on twitter @explodingarrow or subscribe to her monthly essay about art at www.tiffanybabb.com.

 

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In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother—and herself—Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles a unique world of food, wine, and travel; a world filled with colorful characters, mouth-watering traditions, and sumptuous feasts. Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before. A charming, smart translation of Alice Waters’s ideals and attitudes about food for a new generation, Always Home is a loving, often funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely written look at a life defined in so many ways by food, as well as the bond between mother and daughter.

 

Fanny Singer is a writer, editor, and co-founder of the design brand, Permanent Collection. In 2013, she received a Ph.D. on the subject of the British pop artist Richard Hamilton's late work from the University of Cambridge. In 2015, she and her mother, Alice Waters, published My Pantry, which she also illustrated. Having spent more than a decade living in the United Kingdom, Fanny recently moved back to her native California. Based in San Francisco, she travels widely, contributing art reviews and culture writing to a number of publications including Frieze, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Apartamento, T Magazine, and Art Papers, among others.

 

Tamar Adler is a contributing editor to Vogue. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the NewYorker.com, and other publications. Adler has won a James Beard Award and an IACP Award, and is the author of An Everlasting Meal and Something Old, Something New. She lives in Hudson, New York.
 

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It seems that wherever Aria goes, someone wants to touch her hair. In the street, strangers reach for her fluffy curls; and even under the sea, in the jungle, and in space, she's chased by a mermaid, monkeys, and poked by aliens...until, finally, Aria has had enough!

 

Author-illustrator Sharee Miller takes the tradition of appreciation of black hair to a new, fresh, level as she doesn't seek to convince or remind young readers that their curls are beautiful--she simply acknowledges black beauty while telling a fun, imaginative story.

 

Sharee Miller has a BFA in communication design from Pratt Institute. She lives in Brooklyn, where she enjoys spending time with her two cats and illustrating fun stories. Sharee is the author and illustrator of Princess Hair. She invites you to visit her website at www.shareemiller.com and her Instagram @coilyandcute.

 

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Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

 

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

 

C Pam Zhang's debut novel, HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD, is forthcoming in April 2020 from Riverhead Books in the US and Virago Press in the UK. It is an Indies Introduce pick. Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She currently lives in San Francisco and also online.

Alice Sola Kim, a left-handed anchor baby currently residing in New York, is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Tin House, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Lenny, BuzzFeed Books, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

 

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Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues. As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check.

 

As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.

 

Molly Pohlig graduated from James Madison University with a BA in English, and from University College Dublin with an MA in Film Studies. She is the associate editor for Vogue Knitting magazine, and has written humorous pieces and personal essays for Slate, The Toast, Racked, and The Hairpin. Originally from Virginia, she currently lives in Brooklyn.  

Jess Zimmerman is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Her essay collection on mythological monsters is forthcoming from Beacon Press. 

 

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Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

 

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

 

Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.

 

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Marisa Siegel lives, writes, and edits near NYC. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her poems have appeared in Handsome, Zaum, (T)here, and elsewhere. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press. 2019) and her debut poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Burrow Press in 2021. She is Editor-in-Chief and owner of The Rumpus. Follow her on Twitter @marisasaystweet.

 

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San Cristóbal was an unremarkable city—small, newly prosperous, contained by rain forest and river. But then the children arrived.

 

No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.

 

Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).

 

Andrés Barba is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Such Small Hands and The Right Intention. He was one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish novelists and received the Premio Herralde for Luminous Republic, which will be translated into twenty languages.

 

Álvaro Enrigue was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The White Review, n+1, London Review of Books, El País, among others. Sudden Death—his first novel translated into English—was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into many languages. Enrigue was born in Mexico and lives in New York City.

 

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When Herb, a magician’s rabbit, gets sick and tired of being pulled out of Abracadabra Al’s hat, he quits and sets out to find a new job. A funny and irreverent picture book about standing up for yourself, complete with bright collage art and a healthy dose of friendship.

 

What’s in a name? In the companion to I Do Not Like Al’s Hat, Sophie and Herb send away for an elephant to be their new friend. When he arrives in the mail without a name, it’s up to them to find the perfect moniker for their giant pal. This funny picture book about friendship, identity, and why we have names is illustrated with bright collage art and a healthy dose of humor.

 

Erin McGill is a life long New Yorker. She received a BFA in illustration from Pratt Institute, where she discovered her love of patterns and textures. Erin is the author/illustrator of I DO NOT LIKE AL’S HAT, I DO NOT LIKE THAT NAME and MATCHY MATCHY. She currently lives in Manhattan with her husband. 

 

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Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in L.A. alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.

 

Vanessa is a privileged young heiress who wanted to make her mark in the world. Instead she becomes an Instagram influencer—traveling the globe, receiving free clothes and products, and posing for pictures in exotic locales. But behind the covetable façade is a life marked by tragedy. After a broken engagement, Vanessa retreats to her family’s sprawling mountain estate, Stonehaven: a mansion of dark secrets not just from Vanessa’s past, but from that of a lost and troubled girl named Nina.

 

Nina’s, Vanessa’s, and Lachlan’s paths collide here, on the cold shores of Lake Tahoe, where their intertwined lives give way to a winter of aspiration and desire, duplicity and revenge. 

 

Janelle Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of Watch Me Disappear, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and This Is Where We Live. An essayist and journalist, she has written for Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and numerous other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.

 

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In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power--the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

 

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

 

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

 

Madeline Miller grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. She has taught and tutored Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for the past twenty years. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms.The Song of Achilles, her first novel, was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. It has been translated into over twenty-five languages including Dutch, Mandarin, Japanese, Turkish, Arabic and Greek. Madeline was also shortlisted for the 2012 Stonewall Writer of the Year. Her second novel, Circe, was an instant number 1 New York Times bestseller, and won the 2018 Elle Big Book Award. Madeline's essays have appeared in a number of publications including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Telegraph, Lapham's Quarterly and NPR.org. She currently lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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It’s the end of summer when we meet Sarah, the end of summer and the middle of her life, the middle of her career (she hopes it’s not the end), the middle of her marriage (recently repaired). And despite the years that have passed since she last saw her daughter, she is still very much in the middle of figuring out what happened to Leda, what role she played, and how she will let that loss affect the rest of her life.

 

Enter a mysterious stranger on a train, an older man taking the subway to Brooklyn who sees right into her. Then a mugging, her phone stolen, and with it any last connection to Leda. And then an invitation, friends from the past and a weekend in the country with their new, unexpected baby.

 

Over the course of three hot September days, the two couples try to reconnect. Events that have been set in motion, circumstances and feelings kept hidden, rise to the surface, forcing each to ask not just how they ended up where they are, but how they ended up who they are.

 

Joanna Hershon is the author of four novels: Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride, and A Dual Inheritance. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, and two literary anthologies, Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, their twin sons, and their daughter.

 

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. 

 

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In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.

 

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer & educator. Interim Executive Director of Urban Word NYC & Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby & Black Girl Magic (Macmillan), Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books) & Dear Twitter (Penmanship Books). She is also the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) & as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration's, investigating its impact on women and children. She resides in Brooklyn, NY. Photo credit: Mark Poucher

 

Cathy Linh Che is a poet, teacher, and arts administrator living in Queens. She is the author of Split, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She is working on a manuscript called FADE IN about her parents' experiences as refugees playing extras in Apocalypse Now. Photo credit: Jess X. Snow

 

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University. Photo credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith

 

Nabila Lovelace is a born & raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her parents hail from Trinidad & Tobago & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is forthcoming from YesYes Books. Currently you can find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa. Photo credit: A. H. Jerriod Avant

 

Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbook Year Zero, winner of a 2015 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Poetry Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, NEA, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, California, where she teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants. Photo credit: Andria Lo

 

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Regardless of the medium, July’s daring, urgent, and idiosyncratic voice finds unexpectedly accessible forms that reflect the poignancy and strangeness of the human plight. In film, fiction, performance, public art, commerce, and even a smartphone app, July deftly explores themes of inclusivity, desire, fear, and fantasy. This chronological survey spans the artist’s entire career to date, including her early plays and fanzines, participatory works, and personal projects which illuminate the multidimensionality and timeliness of her work.

 

Miranda July is brought to life in an introductory interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson and candid recollections by friends, collaborators, curators, assistants, and audience members: Carrie Brownstein, David Byrne, Spike Jonze, Sheila Heti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and July herself. This revealing, insightful commentary provides an intimate perspective on the artist’s ever-evolving process. July may be impossible to categorize, but the enduring importance of her work and her status as an essential cultural icon is irrefutable.

 

MIRANDA JULY is one of the most impressive cross-disciplinary artists of her generation. A filmmaker, artist, and writer, her daring, urgent, and inimitable voice persists in reflecting the poignancy and strangeness of the human plight.

 

She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and recently added to the Criterion Collection. Her latest film, Kajillionaire, which she wrote and directed, world premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

July is an award-winning author. Her most recent book published by Prestel April 2020, Miranda July, has re-imagined the art monograph as an oral history on her career to date. July’s collection of stories, No One Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction, which was followed by her debut novel, The First Bad Man. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s and The New Yorker.

 

July’s participatory art works include “Eleven Heavy Things” (a sculpture garden created for the 2009 Venice Biennale); “New Society” (a performance); “Somebody” (a messaging app created with Miu Miu), and an interfaith charity shop in Selfridges department store in London, presented by Artangel.

 

Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.

 

Miranda July will be in conversation with a TBD moderator.

 

 

May Attaway, a dry, witty, and unapologetic narrator, loves literature and her work as a botanist for the university in her hometown, where she lives with her elderly father and holds herself and everyone around her to exactingly high standards. More at home with plants than people, May begins to suspect she isn’t very good at friendship, and she wonders if it’s possible to improve with practice. Granted some leave from her job, May sets out on a journey to spend time with four long-neglected friends.

 

Smart, funny, and full of compassion, Rules for Visiting is a singular look at the way friends become a substitute family, or not. While May travels in search of friendship in the digital age, she begins to confront the pain of her past in real time.

 

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.

 

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Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life’s complexities. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife’s return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own “succulent skin,” the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents’ lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

 

Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Like a Beggar, was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Previous books include The Human Line and Mules of Love, which won The Lambda Literary Award. Bass has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. The New Yorker has published ten of Bass’s poems throughout the years, and two have been chosen for The New Yorker podcast. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

 

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Red Ink is a quarterly series curated and hosted by Michele Filgate, and co-sponsored by Literary Hub. Red Ink makes one think of vitality, blood, the monthly cycle, correcting history, and making a mark on the world. This dynamic series focuses on women writers, past and present. The next discussion, “Defiance,” will feature Afia Atakora (Conjure Women), Laura Bogart (Don’t You Know I Love You), Rachel Vorona Cote (Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Bind Women Today), and Amy Jo Burns (Shiner).

 

Afia Atakora was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Jersey, where she now lives. She graduated from New York University and has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the De Alba Fellowship. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.

 

Laura Bogart is a featured writer at The Week and a contributing editor to DAME magazine. She was a featured writer at Salon, where her essays about body image, dating, politics, and violence went viral - her pieces were regularly recognized as Editor's Choice. She has written about pop culture, often through the perspective of gender, for The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The Rumpus, Vulture, Roger Ebert, The AV Club, and Refinery 29. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst. Laura has been interviewed about body size and pop culture for NPR outlets.

 

Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She also publishes frequently in such outlets as the New Republic, Longreads, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and Catapult. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She and her husband live in Takoma Park, MD, just outside of Washington, D.C. They have a very melodramatic and excellent cat. 

 

Michele Filgate’s work has appeared in Longreads; The Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Tin House; Gulf Coast; O, The Oprah Magazine; BuzzFeed; Refinery29; and many other publications. Currently, she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is her first book.

 

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and Shiner, a novel. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Ploughshares, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

 

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Meet Kimberly, a regular suburban housewife and mother, whose discovery later in life that she was born intersex fuelled her to become an international human rights defender and globally-recognised activist.

 

Charting her intersex discovery and her journey to self-acceptance, this book movingly portrays how being intersex impacted Kimberly's personal and family life, as well as her career. From uncovering a secret that was intentionally kept from her, to coming out to her family and friends and fighting for intersex rights, her candid and empowering story helps breakdown barriers and misconceptions of intersex people and brings to light the trauma and harmful impact medical intervention continues to have on the intersex community.

 

Written from a non-queer perspective, and filled with much-needed, straightforward information and advice about what it means to be intersex, this is a vital and timely resource for intersex people and their families, as well as the general reader.

 

Kimberly Zieselman is an intersex woman, lawyer and the Executive Director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, the world’s largest intersex advocacy organization. Kimberly has more than twenty-five years of experience in advocacy and nonprofit advocacy including Director of Government Relations for Boston Children’s Hospital. Kimberly served on the board of the AIS-DSD Support Group, the largest intersex support group in the US and participated in the UN Office of the High Commissioner & Expert Intersex Consultation in 2015. She is also an official signatory to the updated version of the Yogyakarta Principles on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity – a milestone international human rights guidance document for LGBTQIA+. Kimberly regularly consults on intersex media projects and has been quoted and/or published in outlets including, USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, and The Advocate. Kimberly has a JD from Suffolk University Law School and a BA in Communications and Political Science from the University of Vermont and currently lives outside of Boston with her husband, twin daughters, two cats and a dog.

 

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