Calling for a Blanket Dance stitches an intergenerational quilt of rich themes: gift-giving, second chances, reclaiming culture, family loyalty, and the indelible search for a home.
Fuminori Nakamura’s neo-noir The Gun picks apart the mental machinery of a potential shooter and puts him back together, piece by piece, to identify the fatal components.
Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country turns to the real experts on economic hardship in America: those who live it.
In sociological fashion, satirist/fantasy author Terry Pratchett used issues in his imagined world to show the illogic of the matters, customs, and norms in our lives.
Girlfriend on Mars equips itself nicely on the climate change front, but subsuming that narrative and the tensions within it into the love story redirects the novel’s orbit.
Tokens is about all those things that are moneyish—monetary-like exchanges that are tracked and programmable, shady and social, hard coded and beyond borders.
With the same shocking specificity that sets apart her poetry, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy brings us uncomfortably close to everything the narrator witnesses in a hospital waiting room.
Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Woods brims with biting humor, precise detail, and incisive observations about life and aging.
Past is prologue in NYPD history The Italian Squad: opposition to immigration; institutional racism; political surveillance and repression; police corruption and brutality.
Music and writing are both deeply personal but meant to be shared, as seen in these 10 best contemporary books that blend music and personal narrative.
Rock-loving professor Kimberly Mack spends some time with Living Colour’s Time’s Up, giving the album and the band well-deserved attention and appreciation.
Chuck D’s style in his three-volume, Covid-era graphic novel STEWdio can be described as neo-expressionistic with images and text often intertwined like Jean-Michael Basquiat’s art.
