Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live) delivers a wildly exploratory short story collection. The 15 pieces in Sing to It include a nice mix of flash fiction and longer entries. The titular first story sets an ever-mysterious tone: "At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else." Of course metaphors abound, bizarre spectacles, but also a sense of specificity that could rightly be called the opposite of cliché. The same story also hints at what unites it with the others: "When danger approaches, sing to it." Hempel carves out distinctive characters in the crook of exceptional circumstances. They are imperiled people, all facing something ominous in their lives, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. It's as if Hempel has a secret guide to her own creations, knowing the point of inflection for each.

In "A Full-Service Shelter," a volunteer at an animal shelter that euthanizes dangerous dogs explains how the animals see the humans: "They knew me as the one who loved in them what I recoiled from in people: the patent need, the clinging, the appetite." But the narrator seems to need the dogs just as much, as if caring for them makes the world more sensible. Some of the stories reach the realms of surrealism, such as the "The Doll Tornado," which includes a storm of dolls touching down in an old factory in Greensboro, N.C.

Sing to It fascinates. It pulses with absurdist glee, but has enough humanity to ground its characters in the hard work of looking forward. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

All of the women in Look How Happy I'm Making You are new mothers. Or want to be mothers. Or were mothers, or were almost mothers. In "Field Notes," a woman who studies cancer in mice finds herself unexpectedly--and unwelcomely--pregnant. In "White Carnations," a group of women who are motherless and not mothers themselves celebrate Mother's Day together. Women struggle with the transition into new motherhood in "June" and in "The Ten Warning Signs of Postpartum Depression." Similarly, in another story, a woman tries to understand how she can love her daughter so much while still questioning her decision to become a mother in the first place.

Taken individually, each story is a portrait of new motherhood: the emotions that come from a positive pregnancy test, the trials of newborn days without sleep or sanity, the conflicting advice received from well-wishers when walking through the world with a visible baby bump; the gaping sense of loss left in the wake of miscarriage or death. Taken as a whole, Look How Happy I'm Making You is a testament to the diversity of motherhood. There are any number of ways a woman can (or cannot) become a mother, and any number of ways to feel about that situation. And there is no way to capture fully the wide range of emotions that come with pregnancy, loss, birth, childhood, you name it. And yet, the stories here seem to say, there is something universal about the impossibility of that task that will resonate with any reader, be they mother or not. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Women who find themselves in lives they didn't imagine, and which aren't satisfying, connect the stories in Let Me Out Here. Emily W. Pease, in her debut collection, brings to life a complex Southern landscape and strong sense of place in 16 stories both tender and tough.

The strong and sometimes strangling bonds of family and community weave through these stories. "Primitive" finds a young wife and mother, her husband often away, trapped in a dead-end life. She sees no way out of the crashing boredom that makes up her days and says, "I longed for something to happen, like an explosion, a fire, a crashing plane." Ashamed, she castigates herself: "Oh, the darkness of my heart." In "Submission," a family is making an improbable trek through the woods with their dying infant, in an attempt to summon healing spirits. As they hike, the narrator thinks about the satellites orbiting the earth that are "searching, listening. But not listening to us."

Pease describes women who, frustrated with their lives, often resort to some type of destruction. One woman ruins her art. Another, mortified by a less-than-perfect family dinner, sets fire to her balcony. A Sunday school teacher explains parables through surprisingly violent demonstrations. "The harder you're cracked, the finer you become," she instructs the children, and this remark underscores the broken people in these stories. Primarily women, but men and children, too, bear cracks in their souls and hope that the scars will, somehow, redeem. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

The Good Detective, John McMahon's debut spin on the detective-tortured-by-grief theme, is the first in a planned series featuring P.T. Marsh. He is an up-and-comer in the Mason Falls, Ga., police department, until he loses his wife and son and turns to alcohol. Uncertainty over his father-in-law's potential role in their fatal accident continually gnaws at him.

Off the clock, P.T. visits the abusive boyfriend of a local stripper to give him a warning. The house becomes a crime scene when the man is found dead in his chair, leaving P.T. flummoxed, almost certain he left the jerk beaten but alive. Things go downhill fast when a black teenager is lynched and burned and evidence ties the two killings together.

P.T., partner Remy and former partner Abe dig into both crimes, and the clues fly at a furious clip while P.T. secretly tries to avoid being suspected of the first murder. A few of the numerous plot arcs are extraneous, some leaps in logic are made and police procedure often goes by the wayside, but McMahon is a fine storyteller and his characters are intriguing.

McMahon's fluid writing highlights the dark and emotive themes, with P.T.'s bulldog Sweet Purvis, all he has left, used as a tender emotional touchstone via P.T.'s subconscious. The beautiful small touches McMahon "shows" (e.g., the overgrown shoe ruts in the dirt under P.T.'s son's swing) are more powerful than the "telling," but The Good Detective is fast-paced, compelling and a good start to a promising series. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

The England of 2030 is largely automated, its economy debased to gig work without any social safety net. Remi is a cycling courier in a London crowded by self-driving cars and little airborne robot assistants. He took the job after losing his daughter several years ago and suffering through drug addiction. Now he carts subversive analog documents among clients eager to avoid omnipresent state surveillance.

Remi's latest job ends less than satisfactorily when he's nearly hit by an automated car and accosted by a strange man on the subway. His new life in London unravels via increasingly bizarre encounters with an unnaturally fearless fox. Soon Remi is wrapped up in a mysterious organization based on a 1970s sci-fi novel and its radical author. In exchange for his cooperation with this neo-Luddite group, Remi is promised the one thing he thought he could never have again--his daughter.

Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill is a wildly weird science-fiction mystery with plenty of surprises. Hill (The Folded Man, Graft) manages to maintain an intriguing mystery while building a convincing future England. Though plot and perspective take dramatic shifts during the course of the novel, Zero Bomb is ultimately a satisfying look at the future of labor, automation, human frailty and the duality of terrorist versus freedom fighter. Hill's book is a startling depiction of a multitude of modern anxieties. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Warning: before starting Meredith May's memoir, be sure there's a jar of honey in the house. While The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees is a testimony to a child's resilience and her grandfather's support, it is also an homage to bees and their golden nectar, and a craving for honey is inescapable.

Before May was five, her parents' tumultuous marriage ended in divorce, and her mother moved her two children from the East Coast to California's Carmel Valley, to live with her parents. "Somewhere over Middle America, she had relinquished parenthood," May writes, so no-nonsense Granny took control. But May gravitated to her Grandpa's workshop, a World War II Army bus outfitted with beekeeping equipment, stacks of honeycombs and barrels and pipes for honey-collecting. Their bond was immediate, but May had to earn her way into the Honey Bus. Casually swatting at a bee as if to kill it, she incurred Grandpa's rare wrath: "You. Must. Never. Hurt. Bees," he said, prompting her eager absorption of his bee expertise. She helped Grandpa in the bus and with the hives on his acres of wild Big Sur lands. Through her painful adolescence with her alternately neglectful and abusive mother, "the hive was predictable... it was a family that never quit."

A fifth-generation beekeeper who now tends hives in a San Francisco community garden, May devotes more of her memoir to bees than to her difficult life. She honors her grandfather by pledging to work to stop the alarming bee decline. The Honey Bus is a call to action and an inspiration. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

Artist and designer Chris Rush's first book, The Light Years, is an immersive, colorful, dark and funny memoir about his very unusual childhood and adolescence in the 1960s and '70s.

At just 11 years old, Rush was sent away to boarding school, both because his flamboyant way of dressing was an affront to his father and because his IQ scores on recent tests were "alarming" in the words of his mother, and "inappropriately high" in the words of his sixth-grade teacher. He tried a Catholic boarding school and a very liberal art school, but neither worked out. Rush knew he was different and felt isolated, so shortly after his 13th birthday, he left his home in New Jersey and went to the Southwest, where he moved in with his older sister. Still just a boy, Rush became a part of the counterculture, surrounded by young adults of the "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation. He lived an exciting life of adventure but also one filled with loneliness, disappointment and violence.

In this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction memoir, Rush tells his stunning, remarkable story with warmth and authenticity. Despite his sometimes-horrifying experiences, almost every page is imbued with a wicked wit and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Miraculously, he is able to look back on these wild and dangerous years of his adolescence with humor rather than bitterness in this engrossing memoir. --Suzan L. Jackson, freelance writer and author of Book By Book blog

Political Correctness is a transcription of the 2018 Munk Debate in Toronto on the implications of political correctness and freedom of speech. Born from the vision of philanthropists Peter and Melanie Munk and their Aurea Foundation, the debates have been a fixture of Canadian public cultural discourse since 2008.

Nothing sparks heated discussion like the term political correctness, and this example is no exception. As moderator, Rudyard Griffiths brings together a dynamic pairing of personalities to deliberate the motion, "Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress." The intellectual powerhouse team of Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg argue in favor of the motion, while British comedian and LGBTQ rights advocate Stephen Fry joins critic Jordon Peterson to argue against.

For professor and ordained minister Dyson, it's about conferring a sense of dignity to those who have been marginalized, and for Goldberg, a New York Times columnist, there is a clear connection between political correctness and the march towards equality. Peterson, a professor and author, insists that the left has gone too far in hindering free speech. His absolute dogma on the subject contrasts dramatically with Fry and his soft, leftist "do-no-harm" philosophy. The comedian sees the progressive orthodoxy of the political correctness movement as a blunt instrument causing more harm than good because it is a "recruiting sergeant for the Right."

Addressing the cultural panic resulting from the #MeToo movement, the conflicting priorities of individual rights versus collective rights, and the erosion of rigorous debate on college campuses, Political Correctness packs a powerful punch. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer

Mr. K's final assignment for his middle-school music class is the "Soundtrack of My Life Presentation," in which each student must "choose a song for this moment in your life and write about it." Mr. K enables and enlightens his musical explorers by exposing them to artists as diverse as Patti Smith and A-Ha, and genres as different as bluegrass and punk rock.

For Charlotte Noguchi, aka Charlie, Mr. K's lessons become a catalyst for deep self-reflection. Learning about "Emo" makes her recall her friend Luka, and why he's been missing from school for two weeks. Opera takes her by utter surprise: "It's enough to make me forget everything around me." Her immersive reaction leads her to choose Maria Callas for her "Soundtrack" assignment. Her extensive research about Callas's difficult life encourages Charlie to "[refuse] to be small or ignored" and to admit she wants "to do big things" in her life.

Award-winning Canadian author Kyo Maclear (The Liszts) turns to the graphic novel format in this collaboration with Canadian artist Byron Eggenschwiler (Coyote Tales). Operatic is a spectacular, cleverly intertwined, three-part narrative comprised of Charlie's coming-of-age, Luka's backstory and a compelling Callas biography. For each of the stories, Eggenschwiler assigns distinguishing hues--yellow for Charlie, blue for Luka and red for Callas. The colors overlap when stories momentarily converge, such as Luka's blue desk sitting in Mr. K's golden classroom. Combining enchanting art, mellifluous music and just the right words, Maclear and Eggenschwiler provide a marvelous composition guaranteed to resonate. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon