Category: Book

In her first new book in seven years, Tananarive Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism“Tananarive Due is the master of Black horror, even teaching a class where Jordan Peele guest-lectured. So her new collection, The Wishing Pool, out in mid-April, is a major treat, full of major scares. Due excels at twist endings but also brilliantly creates an atmosphere of creeping dread in which you know something terrible is coming. The Wishing Pool is helpfully divided into four sections, and each feels like a movement in a symphony. There are classic tales of horror, then a series of stories set in a Florida town where the swamp tends to swallow people up; the final two sections shift to science fiction about post-apocalyptic futures. (These last sections include pandemic stories, written before 2020, which hit harder now.) Due shows just how much territory she can cover in one short book and just how versatile terrifying tales can be.”
—Washington PostAmerican Book Award-winning author Tananarive Due’s second collection of stories includes offerings of horror, science fiction, and suspense–all genres she wields masterfully. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due’s stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope. In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, each set against the supernatural or surreal. All are written with Due’s trademark attention to detail and deeply drawn characters. In addition to previously published work, this collection contains brand-new stories, including “Rumpus Room,” a supernatural horror novelette set in Florida about a woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons.

This “compulsively readable memoir…brings to light an issue that has been too long ignored…An immensely important book” (Emily Oster, New York Times bestselling author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet).

A story of a mother’s fierce love for her exceptional child and her courageous journey to break the silence about a hidden risk to pregnant women: “both a beautiful family story and an urgent call to action… [A] moving, potentially life-altering book” (Robert Kolker, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road).

After a seemingly uneventful pregnancy, Megan Nix’s second daughter, Anna, was born very small and profoundly deaf. Megan and her husband, Luke, learned that Anna could have lifelong delays due to an infection from a virus they had never heard of: cytomegalovirus, or CMV, which Megan had unwittingly contracted from her toddler during pregnancy.

Megan was electrified by this knowledge. She had been warned, while pregnant, about the risks of saunas, sushi, and unpasteurized cheese, a lack of folic acid, and an excess of kitty litter. She knew to fear a slew of genetic syndromes she could do little to prevent. But she had not been told that CMV is contagious in the saliva of one out of three toddlers, spread through a kiss, a shared cup, a bite of unfinished toast. She had not been told that the stakes were high, that congenital CMV causes more birth defects and childhood disabilities—including blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism—than any infectious disease. Or that some of these disabilities are evident at birth, but others appear suddenly at age two or three and are never traced back to congenital CMV.

Remedies for Sorrowunfolds across the dramatic landscape of Sitka, Alaska, where Luke makes his living as a salmon fisherman. There, Megan struggles to meet Anna’s needs and dives deeper into the mystery of why no one—not her OBGYN, not her toddler’s pediatrician—had mentioned CMV, despite the staggering cost of this silence to families and children like Anna. From this rugged and beautiful place comes a memoir about the boundless capacity of mothers, the extraordinary child that is Anna, and the lifesaving power of truth.

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Crackling with energy and intelligence, this debut is the “smart, subversive, funny, heartbreaking” (Kamila Shamsie) story of an exceptional teenager coming of age in the shadow of colonialism and communal violence in Nigeria.

Andrew Aziza is an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria. He lives with his fiercely protective mother, Gloria, and fantasizes obsessively about white girls-especially blondes. When he’s not in church, at school, or hanging about town with his droogs wishing to become one of “Africa’s first superheroes,” he’s contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed Andy Africa soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man there claims, despite his mother’s denials, to be Andy’s father, and an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzlingly unique literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of growing up in a turbulent world.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses.

“Life in Five Senses invites us into the seismic shift toward a life grounded in sensation, vitality, and innate intelligence.”—GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed

“An inspiring and practical guide to living in the moment.”—SUSAN CAIN, author of Bittersweet and Quiet

For more than a decade, Gretchen Rubin had been studying happiness and human nature. Then, one day, a visit to her eye doctor made her realize that she’d been overlooking a key element of happiness: her five senses. She’d spent so much time stuck in her head that she’d allowed the vital sensations of life to slip away, unnoticed. This epiphany lifted her from a state of foggy preoccupation into a world rediscovered by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

In this journey of self-experimentation, Rubin explores the mysteries and joys of the five senses as a path to a happier, more mindful life. Drawing on cutting-edge science, philosophy, literature, and her own efforts to practice what she learns, she investigates the profound power of tuning in to the physical world.

From the simple pleasures of appreciating the magic of ketchup and adding favorite songs to a playlist, to more adventurous efforts like creating a daily ritual of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending Flavor University, Rubin show us how to experience each day with depth, delight, and connection. In the rush of daily life, she finds, our five senses offer us an immediate, sustainable way to cheer up, calm down, and engage the world around us—as well as a way to glimpse the soul and touch the transcendent.

Life in Five Senses is an absorbing, layered story of discovery filled with profound insights and practical suggestions about how to heighten our senses and use our powers of perception to live fuller, richer lives—and, ultimately, how to move through the world with more vitality and love.

A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri’s US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed!

As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn’t learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we’re going to fail! Maybe it’s time for a new textbook.

Alexandra Petri’s US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri’s “historical fan fiction” draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.

On Petri’s deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Ayn Rand rewrites The Little Engine That Could. Nikola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain—who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated—offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie.

This side-splitting work of historical humor shows why Alexandra Petri has been hailed as a “genius,”* a “national treasure,”† and “one of the funniest writers alive”‡.

*Olivia Nuzzi, Katha Pollitt

†Julia Ioffe, Katy Tur, John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Jamil Smith, and Susan Hennessey

‡Randall Munroe

In 1934, a luxury cruise becomes a fight for survival as two women’s pasts collide on a round-trip voyage from New York to Havana in New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton’s page-turning new novel inspired by the true story of the SS Morro Castle.

New York heiress Catherine Dohan seemingly has it all. There’s only one problem. It’s a lie. As soon as the Morro Castle leaves port, Catherine’s past returns with a vengeance and threatens her life. Joining forces with a charismatic jewel thief, Catherine must discover who wants her dead—and why.

Elena Palacio is a dead woman. Or so everyone thinks. After a devastating betrayal left her penniless and on the run, Elena’s journey on the Morro Castle is her last hope. Steeped in secrecy and a burning desire for revenge, her return to Havana is a chance to right the wrong that has been done to her—and her prey is on the ship.

As danger swirls aboard the Morro Castle and their fates intertwine, Elena and Catherine must risk everything to see justice served once and for all.