In a basement lab, a technician and a corporate analyst operate a device that views other universes. Each attempt reveals the same beige room, down to the molecule—no sign of change other than a faint smell of cumin. With little else to measure beyond their own growing connection, they attempt to extract fiscal value from the possibility that nothing could ever have been different.
Somewhere on Echo IV, there is a memory of an older, unmarred Earth that could give humanity a chance at starting over. Mission Control calls the alleged portal ‘a way back,’ and Dreyer and her team are tasked with finding it. A Way Back is a punchy cross-genre exploration of obligation, regret, and the futility of trying to escape a future that is all but predetermined by the choices we’ve made.
Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a hybrid flash memoir tracing the long shadow of childhood fear and the complexities of forgiving a dying parent. As a daughter uncovers her father’s painful origins, she begins to understand the man behind the anger—and reclaims pieces of herself in the process.
When our narrator’s house is reclaimed by the wilderness, she embarks with her Pooch on a rambling and rollicking journey. She meets undead deer and living skeletons, travels through dream worlds and deserts of longing, and untangles truths from the messy web of life.
Adeline Song is on the run. The US government has started to hunt down people like her. But when Adeline crosses paths with mechanic Finley Reyes, she must decide whether she will let other people continue to define her, or whether she will finally define herself—before the government uses them both for human experimentation.
If it were anyone else calling, Jamie would not have heard the phone ring. But it’s his ex-girlfriend, Micah, and she needs a ride home from Florida, almost ten hours away. On a rollicking midnight ride from Tennessee to Daytona Beach and back, Jamie turns over his relationship with Micah, his friends, and even God, as he tries to do the right thing and save her. One last time.
Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage is a stunning anthology of 32 powerful essays celebrating Jewish joy. Set in New England, Los Angeles, Seattle; across oceans in Israel, Norway, Spain; in synagogues of youth, forests, and seder tables, its stories, like manna in the desert of our ancestors, sustain body and soul.
Bone Valley Hymnal arrives from the molten core of Utah’s arid landscapes. Here, with the fossils mothers pass down to their daughters Franson-Thiel weaves hymns of heritage and gender performativity.
Mangrove takes the reader on a journey from denial and shame to acceptance and love. In poems both narrative and lyric, comic and tragic, accessible and multilayered, Hollands explores what it was like to grow up gay in the late twentieth century, to deal with grief, and to create a family of one’s own.
If you could have one wish granted, would you ask for another? Make a Wish would. Childhood cancer, the aftermath of divorce, sexual violence, and a teenage girl’s disappearance haunt these poems, while desire and love and the sweetness of simple mornings triumph.