Henry Carter Hull

In this New York Times Critics' Pick, A 14 year old boy, struggling with gender identity and religion, begins to use fantasy to escape his life in the inner city and find his passion in the process.

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one. ... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness." Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield-more rural, more country than the landscape...

"Theo Benton decides to move to the United States to finally finish her novel, and she is soon drawn into a literary labyrinth where identity is something that can be lost and remade for the sake of sales and readership. When her mentor and lover is brutally murdered, Theo wants the killer to be found and justice to be served. But when the prime suspect turns out to be her older brother, Gus, Theo does what is necessary to protect him-to save him....

"An evocative family drama and a riveting mystery about the ferocious pull of motherhood for two very different women in New York City"-- Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth--another female casualty of China's controversial One Child Policy. But with her husband on her trail, the clock...

"I'd seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency. When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take...

"David French examines the depths of the American ideological divide, diagnoses its core causes, and provides a hopeful path forward. Polarization. Tribalization. Division. Some look at the growing political tension in our nation and call it a "cold civil war." Others say it's nothing more than the culture war of the last three decades, amplified beyond reason by social media. David French argues that it's something else-the beginning of a national...