Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass

by Sarah Jones

In Disposable, senior New York magazine writer Sarah Jones brings readers the stories of essential workers and those connected to them, whose lives were forever changed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Written with brutal honesty, Disposable is an unflinching look at a country that does less than nothing to protect its most vulnerable people.

Deborah Smith, who "was never without a job--sometimes two at once," and had a "slight intellectual disability," wasn't able to achieve a stable living situation until late

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I'm a Dumbo Octopus!: A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods

by Anne Lambelet

Animal-loving kids will devour I'm a Dumbo Octopus!: A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods, Anne Lambelet's charming, colorful, and funny guide to everybody's favorite eight-armed sea creatures. 

Grimpy the dumbo octopus knows everything about the other cephalopods in the ocean. Grimpy knows how underwater camouflage works, which octopuses can use tools, and how cephalopods master all kinds of escapes. Grimpy even knows that "cuttlefish use up to 75 different color combinations to communicate," which is approximately

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Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower: Poems

by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming's spare, luminous sixth poetry collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, takes readers across the world: a farmer's market in Arizona, a small Canadian island, a handful of archeological sites in Greece. In each place, Deming considers the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, as well as the intricate interconnections among nonhuman living things. "Old birches lead complicated lives," she notes in "Encountering Trees," describing the ways trees can support

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Papilio

by Ben Clanton, Andy Chou Musser, Corey R. Tabor

Ben Clanton (Narwhal and Jelly series), Andy Chou Musser (Search for a Giant Squid, with Amy Seto Forrester), and Corey R. Tabor (Simon and the Better Bone) join forces to create Papilio, the inventive story of a black swallowtail butterfly, scientific name Papilio polyxenes. The charming and informative tale is divided into three sections, each representing a stage in Papilio's life: "Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly."

Readers first meet Papilio in Clanton's "Caterpillar." The endearing caterpillar,

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The Riveter

by Jack Wang

Jack Wang, a Vancouver, B.C., transplant who teaches at New York's Ithaca College, confirmed he could write exquisite short fiction in his debut collection, We Two Alone. He underscores that prowess in a gloriously absorbing first novel, The Riveter.

Six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Josiah Chang arrives in Vancouver. He's his family's fourth Canadian generation--his "great-grandfather had been a forty-niner, but a poor one"--and yet Josiah can't call himself Canadian, can't serve the country

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The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

The River Has Roots is an impressive first solo novella from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar (This Is How You Lose the Time War, with Max Gladstone), taking readers to the very edge of Faerie in a gripping tale of love, sisterhood, and those who would break those many and varied bonds.

The river Liss winds from Arcadia to the town of Thistleford, where sisters Esther and Ysabel are charged with tending to the enchanted willows on the edge of the realm. They sing to the trees, thanking them

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