Adult Assembly Required

by Abbi Waxman

Abbi Waxman (Other People's Houses) explores the challenges of adulting in her warmhearted fifth novel, Adult Assembly Required. Laura Costello wants to believe she's a full-fledged grown-up, which means being able to handle everything on her own. But right after she moves to Los Angeles for grad school, while still struggling with the traumatic effects of a serious car accident that occurred a couple of years earlier, her apartment catches fire. Almost before she knows it, Laura finds herself adopted by booksellers

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Translating Myself and Others

by Jhumpa Lahiri

The art of literary translation is "central to the production of literature, not an accessory to it," writes Jhumpa Lahiri (Whereabouts) in Translating Myself and Others. Talk about linguistically precocious: when a teacher forced five-year-old Lahiri to write "Dear Mom" in her homemade Mother's Day card, rather than the Bengali "Ma," she had already "intuited the central and complex role that translation was to play" in her writing. In 2015, she took her writing in a seemingly unexpected direction: She moved

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The Ghosts of Rose Hill

by R.M. Romero

A 16-year-old violinist descends into a haunted summer of love and longing in The Ghosts of Rose Hill, a lush and fantastical modern folktale in verse from R.M. Romero (The Dollmaker of Kraków).

After a disappointing academic year, Ilana Lopez, a child of Cuban and Czech refugees, is sent from her home in Miami Beach to Prague to spend the summer with an aunt. Ilana is supposed to abandon violin and refocus on her studies but reclaims a forgotten Jewish cemetery instead. There she finds a ghost, Benjamin,

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Antipodes

by Holly Goddard Jones

Antipodes, the fourth book and second collection of short stories by Holly Goddard Jones (The Salt Line), offers 11 riveting stories of contemporary life in the American South and Midwest. Some have pandemic settings and others are gently magical; all are true to the anxieties of modern careers, marriage and parenthood.

The narrator of the title story, a harried mother attending college classes in Kentucky, seeks to balance the opposing forces of her life and wonders what she might have to sacrifice. The ending

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Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, & Revolution in the Borderlands

by Kelly Lytle Hernández

Ricardo Flores Magón and the revolutionary movement he created (the magonistas) were considered precursors to the larger Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. But the story is often "folded into the corners of Mexican American history," according to MacArthur Fellow and historian Kelly Lytle Hernández (City of Inmates) in the impressively researched Bad Mexicans.

The story of the magonistas is essential to understanding the history of the United States, Hernández claims, and particularly the

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Angry Me

by Sandra V. Feder, illus. by Rahele Jomepour Belle

Emotions are rarely black and white. Angry Me artfully captures the nuances of anger and the reactions it inspires as a girl deals with the quotidian trials of her day.

Different feelings--sadness, frustration, disappointment, outrage--often underlie anger. A brown-skinned girl in a pleasingly multi-colored, multi-patterned outfit expresses the many ways she gets angry: "It's my turn!" angry; "I can't do it!" angry; "What about me?" angry. She tries to remember to use her words but sometimes, she says, "my

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