Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Happy Land

When Nikki travels to visit her grandmother in western North Carolina, she expects answers about her family's history. But instead, she uncovers her connection to the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a community of formerly enslaved people. The novel follows Nikki as she delves deeper into family secrets. Perkins-Valdez says she was inspired by the true story of an autonomous Black community that once lived in the mountains of Appalachia.
 
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Rhonda Zimlich: Raising Panic

Set in 1978, a time of Ditto jeans and rabbit's foot keychains, Raising Panic captures the bond of sisters struggling to find security in an alcoholic home and their attempt to escape. PJ McCormack wants nothing more than to leave her rural valley and alcoholic mother, the way her father did years earlier. But she cannot leave behind her nine-year-old sister, Panic.  

Instead, she teaches Panic about survival, hoping to prepare her to someday leave. After Panic witnesses the historic PSA 182 jetliner crash (the first televised mass-casualty event in the US), the family is thrown into crisis, solidifying the sisters' plan to leave. As their situation spins out of control, they'll learn the reason behind their father's disappearance, the source of rabbit's foot keychains, and the origin of Panic's name.

-Winner of the 2023 Book Award for Prose from Steel Toe Boots. 

David Keplinger: Ice

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt.  

"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history, too) in an effort to understand modern life." —New York Times Book Review

“Ice… shifts gracefully from geological epochs to intimate moments. In the opening poem, locals are searching for a mammoth tusk. Later, we see a grandmother mending socks. Glaciers collapse in the warming climate, while far away a mother reads Emily Dickinson on her deathbed. What does it mean to live in these latter days when ‘we run false hope / as if it were a red light’? —Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

Kyle Dargan: Panzer Herz

A poet’s final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity

The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity.

Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.

Andrew Bertaina: Ethan Hawke and Me

When Andrew Bertaina first saw the 1995 Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy film Before Sunrise, he was 15, painfully shy, and living a sheltered existence in small-town California. The movie cracked something open in him, with its romantic European setting and its charming, intelligent protagonists, who fall in love with each other over the course of a day spent wandering the streets of Vienna.  

Fast-forward 25 years, and Andrew’s teenaged romanticism has been challenged by life’s realities, which have included a marriage, a child, a move across the country, a divorce. When Andrew decides to revisit the film, with a new partner and a bottle of wine, he can’t help but wonder: Will he still see himself in the movie? And, perhaps more importantly, will she?

Rachel Louise Snyder: Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Acclaimed author of No Visible Bruises, Rachel Louise Snyder's acclaimed, piercing account of her journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of violence against women.

Award-winning journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has spent her career reporting on abuse and violence around the globe. For decades, she has focused on others’ stories over her own. Now, in Women We Buried, Women We Burned, Snyder offers her own origin story of loss and survival after her mother’s early death and the drastic changes that followed alter the course of her life forever.

“…A bold and searing memoir about family and violence, illness and independence, pain and fear and beauty..." —Patrick Radden Keefe

Patricia Park: What's Eating Jackie Oh?

A Korean American teen tries to balance her dream to become a chef with the cultural expectations of her family when she enters the competitive world of a TV cooking show. A hilarious and heartfelt young adult novel from the award-winning author of Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim and Re Jane.
 
“Park’s novel delivers authentic characters who will make you laugh…and cry. Not to be missed!” –Ellen Oh, author of The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee

Melissa Scholes Young: The Hive

A powerful portrait of a family coming to terms with a changing world point-of-views, in which grief and regret gracefully give way to the enduring strength of the hive.

“The Hive by Melissa Scholes Young is real and raw, and will pin you back in your seat. It’s a powerful portrait of a family coming to terms with a changing world that some are ready for, and others are not. The Fehler family is beautifully rendered in their messy complexity―flawed, tragic, and hopeful, all at once. I loved it." ―Alex George, author of The Paris Hours

Andrew Bertaina: The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place

Andrew Bertaina is going through a mid-life crisis: failed marriage, child-rearing, self-doubt, ennui, the works. Naturally, Bertaina does what any of us would do; he draws inspiration from the poster boy of mid-life crisis chroniclers, the 16th-century essayist Michele de Montaigne, channeling misgivings into meditations, lostness into longing.  

The essays in The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place deal with a variety of timeless and universal topics: e.g., how to woo a French woman on a train, male caregiving, how to cannibalize your spouse, and the riddle of time. The essays promise no answers. They do, however, strive to capture the beauty that lingers in a life passing all too quickly.