Under Story

by Chloe Benjamin

Chloe Benjamin's third novel, Under Story, is a riveting story of grief, love, and science that spans time and universes in an utterly original (and mysterious) way.

Under Story follows Laurel Salter, a fungi scientist who flees Madison, Wis. (where she once had a family and husband) to Antarctica, where she takes a job as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station. Once there, she finds herself fascinated by an unexplained phenomenon called the Arc--a glowing dome that's visible from the station. Soon, her ex-husband,

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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore

Historian Jill Lepore (The Deadline) pulls no punches in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. From the first sentence of the preface, she clearly defines her bold claim--that humans must resist being ruled by automated systems or risk the destruction of democracy and the natural world--and her willingness to defend it. She also proves her facility at doing so; she is assertive without being strident and builds her case methodically and without undue dramatics. But the case she builds is not without its

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A Plagued Sea

by Kim Bo-Young, trans. by Sophie Bowman

Kim Bo-Young, whose previous titles in English translation are story collections--I'm Waiting for You and On the Origin of Species--presents A Plagued Sea, an eerie novella about a fatal pandemic, originally published in 2020, before the Covid-19 lockdowns. Sophie Bowman, who co-translated I'm Waiting for You, translates from the Korean.

Security officer Seo Muyoung is traveling on holiday with her young niece, Hyun, ahead of Hyun's parents, who are scheduled to join them the next day. Despite a significant

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Ege and Ávra

by Evgenia Mantikas, Elifgül Büyükoral, illus. by Nazli Tarcan

In their optimistic, endearing debut picture book, Ege and Ávra, writers Evgenia Mantikas (third-generation Greek American) and Elifgül Büyükoral (born and raised in Türkiye) write a "love letter to [their] cultures and peoples" about a Turkish girl and a Greek girl who unexpectedly connect while fishing on the Aegean Sea.

Illustrator Nazli Tarcan's opening double-page spread depicts the vastness of the waterway that separates the girls' homelands. Although both countries share lush

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Raise the Bar

by Fernanda Frick H.

The buoyant, celebratory middle-grade graphic novel Raise the Bar by Fernanda Frick H. features a young, self-taught Chilean weightlifter who earns the chance to train under her Olympian idol.

Sam "didn't choose to be strong... at first." When she was a small child, she saw Brazilian lifter Eva Dos Santos become the first Latin American woman to win a gold medal for lifting, and it lit a fire inside of her. Now, Sam learns to weightlift by watching videos and using the limited equipment available to her at

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