by Mikołaj Grynberg, trans. by Sean Gasper Bye
Confidential, Polish photographer and psychologist Mikołaj Grynberg's haunting, bitingly funny novella, begins exactly where his lauded story collection, I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To, concludes. Returning translator Sean Gasper Bye ensures a seamless transition. Confidential's first line precisely duplicates the last sentiment of the earlier work's final story and continues: "I suggest you practice saying goodbye to your memories.... It's time to set time free." Storytelling
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by Elizabeth Harris
And the prize for the novel that best captures its political moment goes to... How to Sleep at Night, Elizabeth Harris's powerhouse debut, in which social loyalties are tested in the most scintillating and witheringly funny ways possible.
One day, Nicole Harmon, who lives in New Jersey with her husband and two kids, sees someone from her past on the TV news: it's Kate Keller, whom Nicole briefly dated when they were in their 20s. Kate is now a journalist with New York's Herald Ledger. Nicole decides to follow
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by Elisa Stone Leahy, illus. by Maine Diaz
A tween girl who consistently works to please others searches for her true self when her anonymous webcomic goes viral in Mallory in Full Color by Elisa Stone Leahy (Tethered to Other Stars), a spirited middle-grade novel about the multitudinous splendor of the self.
Twelve-year-old Mallory Marsh never lets anyone down. She stretches herself thin to help her overworked single mom, keeps anything a classmate might need in her backpack, and orders whatever pizza her friends like. She even hides her anger when
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by Orlando Reade
What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade is a revelatory examination of the political significance of John Milton's epic poem, reaching back to its origins in the 17th-century English Civil War and pursuing it into 21st-century prison classrooms.
Reade, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University London, included Paradise Lost in a class he taught in a New Jersey prison while completing his doctorate. His students' "respectful but not reverential" reaction
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by Kate Fagan
Kate Fagan offers readers a story within a story within a story in The Three Lives of Cate Kay, which takes the form of a fictional memoir by a wildly successful author who does not exist--in this world or in the one Fagan has imagined. Kay is nothing more than a pen name, the third persona adopted by the girl once known as Anne Callahan from Bolton Landing, N.Y. "Annie Callahan, aka Cass Ford, aka Cate Kay"--one person, one life, lived in three stories, with three names.
Kay prefaces her memoir with
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by Renée Watson, illus. by Sherry Shine
Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor-winning author Renée Watson's Cicely Tyson is a gracefully written picture book that's both a nonfiction account of the life and work of the actress and human rights activist and a love letter to Harlem and Black history.
Tyson was born in New York in December 1924. When she was young, a stranger told her mother to "take care of that baby. She is going to make you very proud." Watson (Black Girl You Are Atlas; Piecing Me Together) expertly describes Tyson's
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