Step right up, folks: It's an all-you-can-read buffet, with flavors to suit virtually every palette.
Only press your face up to the proverbial sneeze guard, and you'll note selections of fiction here, nonfiction there, as well as one book that teeters tipsily between them. Here you'll find horrors born of folklore, time-travel larks and short stories grounded in local detail — even hard science that is quite literally grounded, concerned with the rocks that tell of our planet's inconceivably deep past.
Please, don't be shy. Fill up on seconds and thirds, if you'd like! Note that our next course will not be served until next week.
The Bewitching, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Back in 2016, discussing a previous novel, Moreno-Garcia mentioned to NPR's All Things Considered that she grew up on her great-grandmother's stories of witches, in an environment in which "fact and fiction were fairly mixed." Some nine years and eight novels later, it's clear those old witch stories still have a tenacious grip on the author of Mexican Gothic. Her latest book centers on Minerva, a graduate student weaned on her own great-grandmother's stories of witch encounters — sound familiar? Let's hope for the author's sake that that's about as far as life reflects art, given the horrors that await Minerva when those lingering memories and her studies bear frightening fruit.
The Girl I Was, by Jeneva Rose
Few figures can draw down our wrath quite like our past selves. The wrong turns, the lost opportunities, the cringe-inducing miscues, it would have been nice if, from time to time, you could just go back in time and bawl out the blundering fool responsible. Rose, a deft hand with mystery and romance, has fun granting that rather mixed blessing to the woebegone lead of her latest novel, who, nearing middle age, gets the chance to confront the person she was in college, face to face, time paradoxes be damned.
If You Love It, Let It Kill You, by Hannah Pittard
OK, this gets complicated: Pittard's new novel is a thinly fictionalized story about discovering that her ex-husband had written a thinly fictionalized novel of his affair and their divorce, which in turn had been closely preceded — in both fiction and real life — by that same ex-wife's memoir about said affair and divorce, which in turn … and so on. Follow all that? There are more layers to this recursive morass of heartbreak, betrayal, autofiction and the ethics of mining one's life for material, but that's probably sufficient to make what appears to be the salient point here: Never, under any circumstances, date a writer.
Make Your Way Home, by Carrie R. Moore
In Moore's debut short story collection, "home" for the book's mostly Black cast means the American South — if you're reading the word in a literal sense, that is. But, of course, there are other ways to read it too: The 11 naturalistic stories collected here all in some way circle back to what it means to lose or still seek your home. Or, for better or worse, to find that you were always home already.
Strata: Stories from Deep Time, by Laura Poppick
It can be fun (and frightening) to imagine humans at the center of everything but, the truth is, we arrived awfully late to the party. Humans have been around for a vanishingly small fraction of the Earth's roughly 4.5-billion-year life so far. So, latecomers that we are, it's only natural to ask: What did we miss, guys? Science journalist Poppick's first book offers an accessible introduction to what we know of the vast, obscure past that predates us, one layer of rock at a time. In these layers are recorded the cataclysmic transformations that have shaped the place we call home.
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