Books

Both an art book and a kind of poetic herbarium, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children defies easy classification. That’s for the benefit of readers, though: Untethered to the conventions of traditional genres, writer Jamaica Kincaid is free to create something brand new, and perusing the pages feels like true discovery. Kincaid’s tone shifts

It’s almost the end of June, which is always a tricky time. For one thing, we’re almost done Pride Month. Luckily, we keep the spirit of Pride all year around here — plus, my city celebrates well into July. But the end of June also means we’re at the halfway point of the year, which

Diane Marie Brown’s Black Candle Women tells the story of three fierce Black women united by the spells and elixirs that have been passed down in their family. Willow, Augusta and Victoria Montrose lead a quiet existence in California until Victoria’s teenage daughter, Nickie, becomes involved with Felix. Unaware of the family curse—that anyone a

When Daniel Lohr’s and Leah Auerbach’s eyes meet as they wait to board the SS Raffaello, their connection is instant and electric. The year is 1939, and they’ve both booked first-class passage on a weekslong journey from Trieste, Italy, to Shanghai. But while the cruise liner is massive in size and gorgeous in design, its

A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real. Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh,

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over

For so many of us, the refrigerator is an appliance we’ve interacted with daily for as long as we can remember. It’s also one we take for granted, rather than viewing it as emblematic of the world-changing innovation Nicola Twilley explores in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. As readers will

10 Nebula Award Winners You Should Put on Your TBR Early June marks the latest round of Nebula Award winners. I’m writing this post before the awards, so by the time this goes live, the winners will have been announced. Congratulations to them all! As both an admiring reader and aspiring writer in the science

Susie (she/her) is a queer writer originally from Little Rock, now living in Washington, DC. She is the author of QUEERLY BELOVED and the forthcoming LOOKING FOR A SIGN from Dial Press/Random House. You can find her on Instagram @susiedoom. View All posts by Susie Dumond It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Pride

“Rat stories are like ghost stories: everybody has one,” writes British author Joe Shute at the start of Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat. Shute’s own original rat story involves going to an alley to watch a ratcatcher and his trained dogs at work. The rats escaped down a sewer, sparing the author the

Trains are, for whatever reason, surprisingly common in contemporary genre fiction. Perhaps it is their predictability, with their reliance on firmly laid tracks and regular timetables representing an imposition of order on a chaotic world. But rarely is this made so explicit as in Sarah Brooks’ The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, where a

Alice Nuttall (she/her) is a writer, pet-wrangler and D&D nerd. Her reading has got so out of control that she had to take a job at her local library to avoid bankrupting herself on books – unfortunately, this has just resulted in her TBR pile growing until it resembles Everest. Alice’s webcomic, writing and everything

There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures), one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. In her 12th book, The Glassmaker, Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that

Ashlie (she/her) is an educator, librarian, and writer. She is committed to diversifying the reading lives of her students and supporting fat acceptance as it intersects with other women’s issues. She’s also perpetually striving to learn more about how she can use her many privileges to support marginalized groups. Interests include learning how to roller

When little Afia can’t sleep, her mind as active as a summer night, she and her papa travel in their imaginations to find love. And find it they do—in the sun-warmed sand, on a snowy mountain top, in the ocean’s friendly waves and even in the darkest night sky. Before she finally drifts off to

Both Same as It Ever Was and your debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, are lengthy novels that examine family dynamics over the course of decades. What draws you to this type of story? I’ve always been drawn as a reader to big, meaty novels that stick with a cast of characters over a