ALONG THE TRAIL

Seventeen-year-old Winnie Hayes wants to feel as excited as her Papa does about the free land in the Oregon Territory available to new arrivals settling there for a five-year period, but the family’s 2,000 mile journey there from Missouri as part of a covered wagon caravan is grueling. Winnie’s delicate newlywed sister, Nora, is even …

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WEIMAR UNDER THE PALMS

In 2002, Swiss author and theater director Blubacher received a grant for a three-month residency at Villa Aurora, a 7,000-square-foot “Spanish colonial revival villa” in Pacific Palisades that was Thomas Mann’s house in the 1940s. That neighborhood, west of Beverly Hills, is now home to wealthy residents, many of them in the entertainment business. Sixty …

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Smart Spending: How Many Book Awards Should You Enter?

In this Alliance of Independent Authors post, Book Award Adviser Hannah Jacobson explains how to set a smart, realistic budget for award submissions and decide how many competitions are worth your time and money. The post Smart Spending: How Many Book Awards Should You Enter? appeared first on The Self-Publishing Advice Center.

CHARLIE MINTO’S PYRAMID SCHEME

It’s 2021, and Charlie Minto is looking forward to a bright future in El Paso, Texas, when tragedy strikes him again. A decade ago, when he was 16,his parents were killed by a drunk driver. Charlie worked through his grief by completing a tour in Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine, then graduated from the University …

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SORRY I KEEP CRYING DURING SEX

In her debut memoir, transgender influencer, actor, and author Rose memorializes events and details during a particularly difficult decade of discovery and desire. Writing with flair and panache, she effortlessly escorts readers across frenetic pages of Grindr app conversation extracts, text exchanges, thoughts about identity (“when does my gender stop being a “gotcha!!!”), and the …

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NOBODY’S GIRL

When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of …

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THIS IS ORANGE

Poliquin’s epic journey opens, naturally, with an orange. Fast facts and anecdotes follow; though presented seemingly randomly, they coalesce into a rich exploration of the color through the lenses of culture, history, and nature. The rooster from The Canterbury Tales, “dreaming of a fox whose ‘colour was betwixe yellow and reed,’” precedes a spread about …

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PARTYPOOPER

Knowing that he only gets a few more kid birthdays before the gifts start turning from cool stuff into things like dress shirts and nose-hair trimmers, Greg is determined to make his upcoming celebration something special. Unfortunately, due to a household mishap, his mom forgot to mark his birthday on the family calendar—and his dad …

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