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ALL DAUGHTERS ARE AWESOME EVERYWHERE

In many of Bellinger’s stories, nothing particularly notable occurs. Or rather, what occurs is commonplace and deeply, tenderly human. These often very brief stories are not concerned with grand, sweeping plots or unexpected twists; instead, they mine the complex, often fraught relationships between characters. In one story, a violinist’s “one-day stand” leads her to reflect on past relationships; in the story “Awesome Everywhere,” a widow grieving the loss of her husband to suicide begins an a

COOPERATIVE CO-PARENTING FOR SECURE KIDS

Shortly after the author separated from her partner, their 6-year-old daughter told her “I feel all alone in the woods!” That distress signal launched Smolarski, a psychotherapist, mediator, and public policy advocate, on a quest to understand what a “good two-home family” might look like and learn how to create one for her own family. In this guide to creating “a co-parenting relationship that allows your child to thrive,” she outlines three different attachment styles and how they affect fami

OTHER STAGES

In 2008, Katrina Devries and Javier Torres, both performers with San Francisco’s West Coast Ballet Theatre, have sex as friends, not lovers, and have a son, Dario, together. A few years later, Javier announces that he’s moving out of their shared house to the other side of the city to live with his lover, Brent. He also makes major changes to the dance company’s upcoming gala: He will now partner with a younger female dancer, and Katrina will be part of another dance, to be created by a disturb

GODSPEED, CEDAR KEY

Before everything changed, both lifelong residents and weekenders in Cedar Key loved the island’s lifestyle, which combined laid-back folksiness with the industriousness of the fishing and clamming industry. One day, a mysterious attack destroys a decommissioned power plant on the mainland, and islanders’ lives are transformed in a blinding flash. The first to perish from radiation poisoning are fishermen who are caught out on the ocean, closest to the blast; one of them, Thomas Buck, is saved

EXTINCTION

What a glorious way to spend a honeymoon: Mark and Olivia Gunnerson go backpacking through the vast Erebus Resort in the mountains of Colorado, where scientists have “de-extincted” species like the woolly mammoth and other Pleistocene megafauna. Just watch the peaceful beasts at their watering holes. Behold the giant armadillos, and the indricothere that make mammoths look like dwarfs. The scientists have removed genes for aggression in these re-creations, so humans will be safe unless they’re

THE CLIMATE DIARIES

Jax Wilkinson, an 11-year-old with a penchant for breaking the rules, struggles academically and clashes with teachers but harbors a fervent passion for combating climate change (“Jax was desperate to understand whyhumans were doing so much damage to our only home”). After landing in detention on the final day of school, Jax seizes an opportunity for mischief, hacking into an abusive teacher’s car’s computer and taking it for a rooftop joyride. Caught red-handed, he faces two options: juvenile

JAX FREEMAN AND THE PHANTOM SHRIEK

Twelve-year-old Jax Freeman is an unwilling transplant to Chicago, sent away from his Raleigh, North Carolina, home by his parents after an incident lands him in the juvenile justice system. Just about as soon as he descends from the train, the weirdness starts: Inanimate objects speak to him, a strange old woman tells him his ancestors need him, and a terrifying creature tries to steal his skin. The strangeness keeps building, from the inspirational signs at his grandmother’s house that keep c

SHADOWHEART

Arrested by Jessup County Deputy Marius Hayes in a Tennessee motel parking lot, drifter Efrem Judah Goode insists he had nothing to do with the deaths of the three women inside the motel or the fourth, also mummy-wrapped with duct tape, in the back seat of the car he’d been driving. But he’s perfectly willing to cop to 13 other homicides stretching back to 2003. He’s unsurprisingly convicted of the four brand-new murders as well, but Special Agent Caitlin Hendrix of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysi

WE ARE MADE OF STARS

At one point, the speaker offers readers a quick framework for his musings, saying that this “story is a memoir in the form of a novel pretending to be a memoir.” After a life spent in Manhattan, where he faced the deaths of many friends from complications from AIDS, the gay storyteller and wanderer moves to a smaller college town and begins to work at an architecture firm. Conversationally, he reveals details of his personal relationships, both in the city and in his new space. Some involve th

REAL TOADS, IMAGINARY GARDENS

For Rekdal, all poems, regardless of form or any other apparently defining feature, require individuals to pay “conscious attention to how [they] think about and use language.” Readers must therefore dispense with interpretations they may bring to a poem and instead become literary “detective[s].” To work toward that end, she dedicates each chapter to in-depth discussions of poetic elements—diction, rhyme, meter, etc.—and to what she calls “forensic” analyses of those elements that she accompli

I DO (I THINK)

From author and comedian Raskin comes a sincere examination of the laws, history, and social norms surrounding Western society’s expectations for a successful relationship and marriage. Drawing on personal experience as well as interviews and first-person stories from American couples, she explores the cultural effects of marriage and how modern-day relationships continually change and evolve. Beginning by questioning what the actual definition of marriage is and why so many unions are often di

CLEAN

On the first page of Trabucco Zerán’s novel, the narrator, Estela García, offers a deal to the people who may or may not be on the other side of a mirrored glass pane: “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.” Estela, it seems, is waiting to be interrogated in connection with the death of a girl, Julia, the daughter of a couple for whom Estela has worked as a housemaid for seven years. What follows is Estela’s account of

THE PRINCESS AND THE (GREEDY) PEA

An attractively decorated bowl is full of peas of varying hues, one of which sports big, round eyes, a huge mouth, and stick arms and legs. The pea exclaims, “I am SO hungry!” The following double-page spread sets up a pattern of the pea swallowing various comestibles—beginning with a brussels sprout—while on the next spread, the text details just what the pea has eaten, in a precise, easily memorized litany that ends each successive verse with, “Without a doubt, / he swallowed a sprout. / What

THE LOVE ELIXIR OF AUGUSTA STERN

Growing up in 1920s Brooklyn, Augusta Stern had two heroes. First, her father, Solomon Stern, a well-respected pharmacist. Second, her great-aunt Esther, who moved in with the Sterns after Augusta’s mother died and deals in medicinals in a less conventional way. Watching her great-aunt brewing healing concoctions in the kitchen in the middle of the night after seeing her father measuring out dosages and counseling patients in the back of his drugstore during the day, Augusta dreams of becoming

EVERY BEAUTIFUL MILE

Penelope Crawford is paralyzed by her grief over the loss of her charismatic husband, Travis, whose plane disappeared weeks ago. Travis had been a local hero, helping with relief efforts for victims of Hurricane Irma. Over the course of 17 years and the births of two children, they had enjoyed an idyllic marriage—then, “he got in his airplane, flew into a storm, and never came home,” as Penelope often reminds herself. “Travis died and time kept going, but I had stood still.” Now, she works at t

THE WILDES

When their mom, respected conservation biologist Dr. Jane Wilde, goes missing during a research trip in Brazil, sister and brother Asia, 13, and Ring, 11, are plunged headlong into the heart of the rainforest. The kids’ veterinarian dad is kept busy at home in Texas as director of the family’s enormous animal park. The omniscient narrator moves between the characters, focusing mainly on the siblings. Asia, despite her encyclopedic scientific knowledge, is desperate to attend a regular school ra

THE BLETCHLEY RIDDLE

Headstrong 14-year-old Lizzie Novis refuses to believe that her mother, a U.S. embassy clerk who was working in Poland, is dead. After fleeing from her grandmother—who’s attempting to bring her back to America—Lizzie locates her 19-year-old brother, Jakob, a Cambridge mathematician who’s stationed at the clandestine British intelligence site called Bletchley Park. Hiding from her grandmother’s estate steward, Lizzie becomes a messenger at Bletchley Park, ferrying letters across the grounds whil

A PLACE FOR US

Wolf’s first experience with death came when his fierce and beautiful mother died from cancer. The loss shattered him: As a “half-Black kid…[with] a knack for musical theater,” he always knew he was different, but his mother had always made him feel safe and accepted in the small Oregon town where they lived. The author’s dark skin and sensitivity made him a target for racist boys “desperate to prove their masculinity,” as they forced him into confrontation with White supremacist propaganda mea

LOVES AND ENTANGLEMENTS

In this assemblage of more than a dozen tales, Bogaty limns the fraught eccentricities that plague relationships between men and women with a perspicacious eye. In the first story, “Obsessed,” a married couple, Carol and Gary, meet a friend named Kempton for dinner. Kempton lives a soap-operatic personal life, one in which he is perpetually “at war with his corporate existence,” clinging fecklessly to his youth. But as messy and infantile as his romantic travails are, Carol can’t help but wonde

A HAUNTING ON THE HILL

Looking to escape New York City in the wake of the pandemic, Holly Sherwin and her partner, Nisa Macari, enjoy exploring charming “little towns long since colonized by self-styled artists and artisans.” Holly, once a promising playwright, is now teaching English at a private school but has recently won a grant to produce the witchy play that may just revive her career. When she stumbles upon a creepy old mansion on an isolated hill, she knows she’s found the perfect place to hole up with the sm