A fixation on the “horse apples”—what the narrator calls “my adorable nickname for horse poops”—of winged Pegasus isn’t all that drags down this effort at role reversal. Pruett sends white-presenting 12-year-old Gyro, who’s been named an “Honorary Indemnified Argonaut,” off with Heracles—here a brawny (and dimwitted) woman with disgusting personal habits—and chiseled narcissist Perseus on …
It’s September 1999, and Y2K is on the horizon. On Junah’s first day of sixth grade, his teacher, Miss Meechum, assigns an unusual project: Fill a shoebox “with things that tell what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world. Your capsule will tell your story.” This is the …
Lindy and her family started their travel adventure after her dad quit his job as a software engineer to avoid “melting down faster than a computer with no fan.” Her mom is “trying to life-coach through lifestyle,” generating content as she poses in front of scenic vistas in national parks and curating flawless images of …
Journalist and podcaster Princiotti isn’t ashamed of her pop-music obsession, and thinks you shouldn’t be, either. She traces her love of the genre back to 2003, when she was 9, and “Hilary Duff was the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family.” The subject of Princiotti’s book is the …
Unlike most kids’ nonfiction about cetaceans, this book focuses on just one meaningful episode, an extraordinary encounter between a whale pod and humans. In 2014, freedivers Fred Buyle and Kurt Amsler floated among sperm whales in the Azores and, noticing that a calf had been born mere minutes earlier, photographed and filmed the animals. This …
Journalist and author Fieseler’s vital account shines a light on the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee—“a forgotten cabal of gerrymandered white legislators that went after Black and queer citizens in the mid-twentieth century at the height of anti-Communist hysteria.” This pursuit led to the surveillance and persecution of Black NAACP activists and then to the firings …
The long-running revival of Powell kicked off in 1987, when Gore Vidal championed her work in the New York Review of Books. Since then, there’s been a biography by Tim Page, two volumes of her fiction in the Library of America, and publication of her Diaries and Selected Letters. Yet, as critic Ilana Masad laments, …
Scene: a New Year’s Eve party in Stockholm, where Ina Mikkola meets a young man named Hector. Ina has two sisters there, Anastasia and Evelyn, but she doesn’t want to find them, lest Hector “fall in love with Anastasia, the fun sister, the crazy sister…[and then] he would catch sight of Evelyn and then he …
Invoking Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, O’Neill-Butler explores the subversive, surprising, and often brilliant tactics of artists fighting for social change. Ten case studies spanning five decades illustrate the original ways artists have demonstrated against unjust practices, “from protesting to philanthropy, and from wheat pasting to planting a field of wheat.” O’Neill-Butler, a former …
Ed is a cowboy poet in the desert Southwest. He’s stable and reliable (even in the ways he finesses his alcoholism), settled, a stand-up guy who emerged bloodied but upright from domestic tragedy in his youth. And he’s found a calling in late middle age as a linchpin of Local 302, the Weepers, who go …