As a barn on a deserted farm in Southwest New Mexico is torn down, an old box sealed with disintegrating duct tape drops to the barn’s floor. The thirty-year-old contents-a Big Chief Tablet, a letter, dog tags from the Vietnam War, and... Read More

Chelsea Fish wants more in life than an artificial pond in the window of a flower store called The Magic Garden. Her friends refuse to join her as she “follows [her] heart’s dream to roam.” With a little suspension of disbelief,... Read More

The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union traumatized the Communist American Left as much as the assassination of President Kennedy devastated the country ten years later.... Read More

After her mother is wrenched from the family and sold, twelve-year-old Lisa and her father flee the Georgia rice plantation where they have been slaves. They head north, hoping to find freedom and Lisa’s mother. Their travels, aided by... Read More

Writing in an elegant style about dark topics, the author invents a shadowy world, in which a sunny summer in 1950s France isn’t quite as idyllic as it might sound. The narrator of this tale is eighteen-year-old Diedre, an American who... Read More

In a recent study, the L’Oreal company found that salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence sold $91,370 more per year than other salespeople did. That’s just one of the facts the author uses to convince readers of... Read More

Nothing surpasses the effectiveness of a metaphor for burning an image into the brain. An excellent way to appeal to a visual generation of self-help readers is to use the concept of an ?inner brat,? to describe the irrational force... Read More

This anthology is the life work of a single translator inspired by a harper’s song carved in hieroglyphics in a tomb more than three thousand years ago: “I have heard the words of Imhotep, and Hordjedef, too, / retold time and again... Read More