by Jess Venner
Jess Venner's The Lost Voices of Pompeii offers an innovative study of Pompeii's final day that examines a vibrant culture and its people in the moments before destruction. On October 24, 79 CE, the 20,000 or so people of Pompeii were going about their daily business when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted spectacularly, and the town forever became known for "how it ended rather than how it lived." Venner uses an emerging methodology called "evidence-based storytelling" or "critical fabulation" to reveal aspects
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by Nick Martino
Scrap Book, the lustrous debut collection by Nick Martino, arose from a Midwestern upbringing in a broken family. In particular, his father's incarceration--from before the poet was born--casts a long shadow.
These 40 poems draw inspiration from Martino's mother's journal and family photographs. The imagery spotlights the surrounding Midwest farm country: "I was raised inside the meadow of my parents'/ broken marriage. Even as a child, I understood. How often I was called to mend/ their love." The poet felt,
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by Andrew Sean Greer
Book lovers who lack the resources to visit the Italian countryside will find the next best thing in Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer's gambol amid the rolling hills and olive groves of Tuscany. Greer has become a virtuoso at crafting charmingly episodic novels, as he demonstrated with the Pulitzer-winning Less and its sequel, Less Is Lost. Now Greer, who has spent much of his adult life in Italy, takes readers through a country he knows well, as seen from the perspective of a recent college graduate who looks
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by Donna Barba Higuera
Firesnake by Donna Barba Higuera is the profound, stunning conclusion to her remarkable postapocalyptic middle-grade trilogy that began with the Newbery Medal- and Pura Belpré Award-winning The Last Cuentista.
Ninety years ago, humans terraformed the barely inhabitable planet of Sagan. Thirteen-year-old Itzel Tui Olmstead is the granddaughter of the colony's reclusive Earth-born storyteller, Cuentista Petra Peña, and the daughter of May, a scientist who died trying to understand Sagan, the humans'
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by Yuichi Kasano, trans. by Cathy Hirano
Japanese author/artist Yuichi Kasano combines an invitingly simple narrative with delightful, fully saturated color illustrations in his undeniably humorous picture book The Fluffy Futon, smoothly translated byCathy Hirano.
"On a warm, sunny day, Grandma spread a futon on the porch to air." Left out there so soft, and fluffy, and empty, it beckons a kitty-cat who lets out "a great big yawn" then drops down--"plofff!" After her initial surprise, Grandma, too, releases "a great big yawn" and joins the kitty.
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by Jessie Sima
In the playfully self-referential picture book The Greatest Bedtime Story Ever by author/illustrator Jessie Sima (Not Quite Narwhal; Harriet Gets Carried Away), a friendly yet prideful elf describes to readers how they crafted a literary masterpiece.
The elf greets readers before the title page: "I have just the tale for you." It all begins "on an evening stroll" in search of a perfect spot to compose a story. However, "inspiration [is] nowhere to be found." When a sound escapes from a cave, they wander among
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