by Corinne Halbert
Acid Nun by artist Corinne Halbert is a beautiful and hallucinogenic journey toward self-healing through a dazzling landscape of Satanic splatter horror. Annie is a sexually and chemically experimental human character, styled in a nun's habit, who connects momentarily with Eleanor, a fanged entity from the spiritual plane. When a bad acid trip, however, traps Annie in an alternate dimension, Eleanor races against time to find and rescue her from certain destruction, with the help of Bahomet, Eleanor's "demon
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by Eduardo Halfon, trans. by Lisa Dillman, Daniel Hahn
Eduardo Halfon (Mourning; Monastery) has published a dozen books in Spanish; four are currently available in English translations. Seeming to challenge his substantial output, Halfon explained in a 2015 comment to Shelf Awareness, "I'm only writing one book, and everything I publish along the way is just part of it. As if each book I write is a page or a chapter." That "one book" is comprised of intriguing autobiographical fictions in which Halfon often inserts himself into multilayered narratives inspired
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by Lamar Giles
Lamar Giles's The Getaway is an intense and unnerving YA dystopian novel that follows the life and struggles of a young Black man and his friends under a corporate dictatorship.
Much of the former United States has been devastated by wildfires, droughts and rising sea levels. As the outside world became increasingly unsafe, with protests, poverty, racism and mass violence, affluent survivors found a retreat in Karloff Country, a resort nestled in the mountains of Virginia. Seventeen-year-old Jay, his friends
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by Hua Hsu
Hua Hsu, whose parents moved from Taiwan to the United States before he was born, handily distills the immigrant experience in Stay True: "The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories." In his memoir, fueled by nostalgia but free of sentimentality, Hsu tells lots of stories--about friendship, assimilation, grief--but they are all in service to the book's throughline: the story of Hsu finding his voice.
Hsu was born in Illinois in 1977. During his first year at Berkeley,
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by Guojing
Few books deserve the "perfect" designation, but The Flamingo by Guojing arguably earns that appellation. The celebrated author of The Only Child and Stormy presents another remarkable, near-wordless story that gloriously commemorates bonds between humans and animals.
A girl in a red hat arrives at a sepia-toned airport and is claimed by her grandmother, dressed in matching red. At her Lao Lao's home, the girl is fascinated by a feather with a reddish tip. Lao Lao's story about a childhood bike ride with her
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by Kim Hye-jin, trans. by Jamie Chang
Award-winning Korean novelist Kim Hye-jin's Concerning My Daughter is a clear-eyed character study of the fraught relations among biological and found families alike. When an unnamed, widowed narrator agrees to let her adult daughter, Green, move in with her, she's already wary of how their lives will cohere. And that's before Green reveals that her girlfriend, Lane, will be joining her.
While Green's mother resists accepting her daughter's partner, she is simultaneously thrown into chaos at work
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by Elise Gravel
Fake news has always existed, but "thanks to the internet, disinformation is everywhere these days." Elise Gravel, author of the Disgusting Critters series, takes a break from frightening creatures to offer up serious insights in this zany look at lies, untruths and other misleading reports. The author employs her characteristic humor and art in this comic-style book to enlighten young readers on the realities of fake news and set them on a path to savvy media consumption.
Gravel explores motivations for lying,
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