Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Alec Aleksic Why are young people saying “unalive” instead of “dead”? Why do all influencers sound the same? How is TikTok changing the way we speak—even for people who don’t use the app? Using his experience as TikTok’s @EtymologyNerd, linguist Alec Aleksic answers these … Read more
American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester In Emily Mester’s childhood home, the dining table was cleared for dining only on Christmas and Easter. Every other day was for piles: piles from shopping bags from shopping hauls from Chicagoland big box stores, but especially from the closest place Emily’s family had to church: Costco. … Read more
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls This year’s winner of the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction is a breathtaking achievement of memoir, art and Chinese history. Growing up, Tessa Hulls knew three things about her grandma, Sun Yi: She was from China, she was a writer, she was crazy. Their home … Read more
Summerhouse by Yiğit Karaahmet, translated from the Turkish by Nicholas Glastonbury To their neighbors on Büyükada, a sleepy island off the coast of Istanbul, pianist Şener and playwright Fehmi are known to their neighbors as unusual artist friends who share a lush, hilltop garden estate. Only their closest friends know the two men have been … Read more
Friends of the Museum by Heather McGowan It’s a no good very bad day for the director of a floundering New York art museum. A PR disaster involving dubiously sourced artifacts is unfolding in real time; meanwhile, the head security guard has a hunch that the new artwork is a fake. Half the staff are … Read more
Orbital by Samantha Harvey Hour by hour, eight billion people wake across twenty-four time zones. High above the atmosphere, six astronauts on the International Space Station are having a very different kind of day. Over the span of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets—one day—their spacecraft chases the sun as its orbit crisscrosses Earth. Orbital spends … Read more
Women’s Hotel by Daniel Lavery Welcome to the Biedermeier. It’s shabbier (and much cheaper) than the Barbizon, but it’s still a respectable residential hotel where a professional single lady can establish herself in 1960s New York City. Women’s Hotel meanders between the Biedermeier’s fifteen floors, offering the reader glimpses into the lives and daily dramas … Read more
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister Wenna Haddesley hasn’t seen her family, their crumbling manor, or their ancestra cranberry bog since she ran away as a teenager. But when she receives a letter calling her home for her family’s mystical, once-in-a-generation ritual, she returns to Appalachia to confront her past. Upon arrival, she finds the … Read more
The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei After years of pulling off interstellar art heists, Princeton graduate student Maya Hoshimoto now uses her skills of evasion to dodge her nagging thesis advisor. But when she stumbles upon a rare library book containing a map to the Stardust Grail—an artifact that could save an alien civilization—she and … Read more
We Are Not Strangers: A Graphic Novel by Josh Tuininga Growing up in Seattle, Josh Tuininga tagged along with his grandfather to Pike Place Market, where they shopped at a Japanese seafood market. He wondered why his papoo, the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Turkey, knew entire Japanese families by name. Using family stories … Read more