by Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith's luminous fifth poetry collection, A Suit or a Suitcase, considers mortality, motherhood, and the layers of the self with her signature humor, wit, and keen eye for detail. With crisp, lyrical observations and striking images, Smith (Dear Writer; You Could Make This Place Beautiful) muses on what it means to be a self, how a self may evolve over time, and the odd, potent power of the human mind to both contain and transcend the limits of experience.
Smith's titular poem explores the body-mind
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by Stacey Lee
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature winner Stacey Lee's Heiress of Nowhere is a sprawling mystery anchored by the thoughtful research and skilled craft that has become the hallmark of Lee's work.
In 1900, an infant was found in a canoe near Orcas Island, Wash. She was taken in by shipbuilder Dakon Sanders, given the name Lucy, and raised on his expansive estate, Nowhere. Now 18, Lucy plans to leave Nowhere, but Sanders offers to reveal information about her father if Lucy will stay. He is murdered
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by Scott Broker
There is an overarching tenderness to the strained marriage dynamic with which Scott Broker opens his understated debut novel, The Disappointment. "No mother.... Remember?" Jack gently admonishes his husband, Randy, who is situating his recently deceased mom's urn into a carry-on bag for their upcoming getaway to the Oregon coast. After a pause pregnant with the slights and resentments accrued throughout a decade in love, Randy decides "some mother" anyway, dispensing a travel-size portion of cremains into
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by Jung Yun
Jung Yun's third novel, All the World Can Hold, is a distinctive 9/11 story. Set on a cruise departing Boston for Bermuda on September 16, 2001, it spotlights three characters who--like the country in the wake of terrorism--face a turning point. Choosing whether to be true to themselves requires reckoning with past traumas, including bereavement, alcoholism, and racist microaggressions.
Korean American lawyer Franny hasn't told anyone that she was caught up in 9/11, sheltering inside a bank and then wandering
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by Caryl Lewis
A teenage artist trapped in an all-girl internment camp uses her paintings to protest oppression in Caryl Lewis's darkly beautiful YA dystopian novel.
In the future imagined by The Danger of Small Things, the extinction of bees led to the destruction of modern civilization. Crops failed, famines started, wars broke out, "governments collapsed," and "militias took over." Now, girls aren't "allowed outside... and boys [have] to learn to fight." At 13, pale-skinned Jess is taken from her mother and brother, Shey,
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by Johan Leynaud, trans. by Sarah Ardizzone
A boy loves his cat so much he wants to keep him a bit too close in artist/illustrator Johan Leynaud's wise and adorable English-language debut, the picture book Arthur's Cat, about expressing and respecting boundaries.
An exuberant spiky-haired boy named Arthur finds out that doting on a cat is a tricky proposition in this French import translated by Sarah Ardizzone. Lovestruck Arthur goes to extreme measures to care for Zeffo, his turquoise-colored kitty. He stacks a mountain of furniture against a bookshelf
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