Crosshairs


Catherine Hernandez - 2020
    In the shadows, a new hero emerges. After he loses his livelihood as a drag queen and the love of his life, Kay joins the resistance alongside Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee, and Firuzeh, a headstrong social worker. Guiding them in the use of weapons and close-quarters combat is Beck, a rogue army officer, who helps them plan an uprising at a major televised international event. With her signature “raw yet beautiful, disturbing yet hopeful” (Booklist) prose, Catherine Hernandez creates a vision of the future that is all the more frightening because it is very possible. A cautionary tale filled with fierce and vibrant characters, Crosshairs explores the universal desire to thrive, love, and be loved for being your true self.

It Is Wood, It Is Stone


Gabriella Burnham - 2020
    As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda’s unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda’s home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda’s instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic and beguiling artist, whom she joins on a fervent adventure that causes reverberations felt by everyone, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way.An exquisite debut novel by young Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is about women whose romantic and subversive entanglements reflect on class and colorism, sexuality, and complex, divisive histories.

Erasure


Percival Everett - 2001
    But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection." "Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto." But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.

Museum of Accidents


Rachel Zucker - 2009
    A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she currently lives in New York City with her husband and three sons, where she is a certified labor doula.

The Refugees


Viet Thanh Nguyen - 2017
    From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.

(Trust) Falling For You


Charish Reid - 2021
    The only thing that will make teaching better is if she can learn how to write a grant and skip those boring committee meetings. In short, a History professor is her problem. He stole her grant and he chairs the most boring committee on campus.Sure, he's cute... but he can afford to loosen up.Samuel Morris is a work-horse.He puts his head down and proves his worth at Franklin University. That means no inane chit-chat with colleagues, no treating students like friends, and no shenanigans during the Assessment Committee. But a certain English professor happens to be full of shenanigans. She's late, loud, and disorganized.Sure, she's sexy... but she can afford to tighten up.They'll both have to compromise.A university team-building retreat to the woods of Wisconsin will ensure that. After a lodging mix-up, the opposites are forced to share the same cabin for six nights. As Team-Building Buddies, they will: sleep together, eat together, and play embarrassing bonding games together. One of them will have to budge. The sexual tension will get harder to ignore, especially when one Buddy requires rescuing from spiders, grasshoppers, and bears. Oh my...

Her Favorite Color Was Yellow


Edgar Holmes - 2017
    It is an ode to his muse, his all-consuming love, his everything- how it feels to find love, lose it, and get it back. Pour yourself some coffee and curl up with this book to let yourself feel something beautiful and true.

In the Country


Mia Alvar - 2015
    Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again. A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?


Kathleen Collins - 2016
    In Only Once, a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate—and final—act of foolishness. Collins’s work seamlessly integrates the African-American experience in her characters’ lives, creating rich, devastatingly familiar, full-bodied men, women, and children who transcend the symbolic, penetrating both the reader’s head and heart.Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major addition to the literary canon, and is sure to earn Kathleen Collins the widespread recognition she is long overdue.