An unassuming fruit orchard holds the promise of a peaceful future for a hardworking Amish family in Beverly Lewis’s novel "The Orchard". Ellie values her faith and her family, but tending to a generations-old peach and apple orchard... Read More

Driven by their convictions and their passion for music, two English sisters provide aid to German Jewish families in Marianne Monson’s kaleidoscopic historical novel "The Opera Sisters". In the 1930s, Ida and Louise are typists in... Read More

Descriptions of nature as competitive (Charles Darwin) and “red in tooth and claw” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) shaped the way people perceive it today. "Sweet in Tooth and Claw" debunks such concepts to reveal that, in fact, cooperation... Read More

"Phalaina" is an enchanting dark fairy tale focused on an ethereal, red-eyed girl who may not be human. Manon is a little girl when she appears, alone in the woods, in late nineteenth-century England. Although she is free and happy, she... Read More

In Ulrich Hub’s early reader Duck’s Backyard, two feathery beings find that their imperfections make them the perfect friends for each other. A duck with a wonky leg who needs someone to support her pairs with a blind chicken who... Read More

Clark Strand’s mystical treatise "Waking Up to the Dark" encourages reconsidering and preserving the entity of night amid a world of incessant brightness. The book reflects upon life prior to gas lighting and Thomas Edison’s... Read More

In "Loving the Dead and Gone", Judith Turner-Yamamoto’s multivoiced novel, the death of a young man provokes women in a rural North Carolina town to revisit their unmet longings. Clayton is puzzled by his wife Berta Mae’s contentions... Read More

Over the course of more than a hundred microstories, "Plain Air" outlines the stuttering lives of the inhabitants of Winesburg, Indiana. Winesburg is the definition of a flyover town. It even has the contrails to prove it. But when the... Read More