by Lim Sunwoo, trans. by Chi-Young Kim, trans. by Chi-Young Kim
Lim Sunwoo's With the Heart of a Ghost features eight intriguing, unpredictable stories, each narrated in chatty first person, as if intimately inviting readers to listen, even join, quirky conversations. A prize-winning debut in Korea, Lim's collection arrives translated by Chi-Young Kim, who also brought the groundbreaking Korean titles Please Look After Mom and Whale to Anglophone audiences.
In the titular opening story, a bakery worker realizes she's not dead, just face-to-face with her own ghostly self,
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by Ej Dickson
Ej Dickson opens One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate with colorful admissions about the her own parental shortcomings, setting the tone for a radically honest discussion of the "stigma surrounding bad mothers." Societal shaming of mothers and the resulting disempowerment of women is the subject of this provocative and entertaining work.
A senior writer at The Cut, Dickson dynamically blends cultural research with witty anecdotal asides.
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by E.G. Alaraj, illus. by Rachel Wada
With an air of heartfelt contemplation, the picture book My Language Is a Garden presents a parent's lyrical ruminations on the gift of language as a way to share cultural heritage and express deep and forever love.
A parent asks their child, "Do you know my language?" The parent's language "roams" like the desert, is a "passage by the sea./ It's a jungle./ It's a forest, with every kind of tree." It "howls in the moonlight," and "beats across the plain." It "rumbles" like thunder and "patters" like rain.
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by Claire Oshetsky
In the darkly comic satire Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Poor Deer; Chouette), a young woman harboring a repressed fascination with the macabre teeters between an outwardly perfect life and a craving for radical, violent change.
In 1974, the Patty Hearst story dominates the media and 19-year-old Celia Dent craves "revolutionary changes" in her own life. She tells herself that she is lucky to have her husband--whom she always calls "my Drew"--to look after her since her strict mother's death, despite his
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by Huda Al-Marashi
In the sincere and touching middle-grade novel Hail Mariam by Huda Al-Marashi (Grounded), a sixth-grade Muslim girl attempts to find her voice amid the complexities of familial relationships, personal responsibility, and faith.
Twelve-year-old Iraqi American Mariam Hassan will be the only Muslim at her new Catholic school. "If you are good," her father tells her, "the people will think good things about the Arabs and the Muslims." The pressure to represent an entire religion and culture is immense, and sitting
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by Nora Shalaway Carpenter, editor
Author and editor Nora Shalaway Carpenter (Fault Lines) pulls together an inspiring and varied collection of cli-fi short stories, all designed to encourage hope in their readers. Onward includes dystopian, speculative, and realistic fiction as well as poetry and essays that highlight the myriad ways the climate crisis manifests and contributes to the "intense climate grief and hopelessness" of young people. But as Carpenter points out in her foreword, "it is story--much more than facts--that changes minds."
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