“How could I have been so obtuse, so neglectful that my dying son hated me until the end?” For Joe Fredericks, the protagonist of Wayne Feinstein's novel, Turning, it took little effort to be such a sleazeball. Joe is the definition of success in one...

Crow: The Luck of Charm by Surya Prakash Shrivastava is a short story about the connection between a boy and a crow. Yash lives in an urban environment, with chaotic traffic and construction noise just outside his window. Inside, chaos comes from his arguing parents....

Kalyani Adusumilli’s The Invisible Canvas begins in the throes of a medical emergency caused by an overdose, where Jansi, a wife and mother living in Texas, is admitted to a psychiatric facility for evaluation and treatment. What begins as a brief hospitalization becomes an extended...

In The Boy with the Butterfly Mind by Lorelei Brush, readers meet Julie, a math teacher juggling her job, marriage, and the nonstop energy of her four-year-old son, Patrick. She feels deeply proud of him, but also worried. His moods range from exuberant curiosity to...

It's Snowing in Sapporo Again Today is a Christmas romance by I.W. Berns. It's been ten long years since Jun Takahashi lost his mother in an unfortunate car accident. Growing up in the snow-covered city of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Jun...

The Color of Our Names by Mahitab Mahmoud follows the lives of four characters trying to navigate identity, faith, and secrecy between Egypt and the United States. Fareed, a 34-year-old man still living with his conservative family in Alexandria, finds fragile moments of freedom at...

At twenty-one, Alice had left college behind and was working at a restaurant, trying to make sense of her life. Her father, John, has accepted her choices, but he worried that she was never going to be an independent and responsible young adult. Alice was...

A Brief History of Wasting Time by Gary C McAuley follows Cyrus, a man who decides that doing as little as possible will govern his days after finishing a long-postponed physics book. He stays indoors, organizes his hours around television, minor contests, and talk, then...

In the fourth book of the Chronicles of the Threlphax series, Of Kith and Kin by Laura Lee Dooley, Tae-hee Kim is a nurse whose life extends far past a normal span. When a man named Kit claims to be her twin brother Tae-soo, declared...

In The Lost Ballerina by Deanna Lynn Sletten, seventeen-year-old Maddie Carlson needs to earn money fast. Her boyfriend, Caden, crashed her car, and her father insists she pay for the repairs herself. Maddie takes a job mowing and weeding the lawn at a big, mysterious...