Revenge, murder, and gender-based hypocrisy in communist China drive the unsentimental narrative of Fang Fang’s short novel "The Running Flame". Yingzhi lives in a small village in the Chinese countryside. Desiring more than what her... Read More

The history of the Kurdish people’s struggle for self-government is at the center of Nicole F. Watts’s riveting book "Republic of Dreams". The modern countries of the Middle East were created when the Age of Empires came to an end... Read More

Women’s friendships are at the center of Amy DeBellis’s coming-of-age novel "All Our Tomorrows". In a postpandemic near future, three women of different backgrounds struggle to make their ways in New York City. Janet, a Korean... Read More

Reporter Jen Stout’s "Night Train to Odesa" is a heartbreaking memoir about the Ukrainian people’s fight to survive a relentless war. Offered a journalism scholarship in Moscow, Stout arrived in Russia during Putin’s regime. When... Read More

Franz Nicolay’s riveting book "Band People" is a behind-the-scenes investigation into the internal dynamics of rock bands. Nicolay notes that documentary The Beatles: Get Back was an eye-opener to many because it revealed what he and... Read More

Scholar Jordan D. Rosenblum’s fascinating text "Forbidden" is a history of how the pig became the litmus test for Jewish identity. In accordance with biblical dietary laws, the pig is only one non-kosher animal out of many. Still, it... Read More

Tim Allis’s fascinating biography of American fashion and retail pioneer Henri Bendel, inventor of the clearance sale, asserts that much of what is taken for granted in modern retail can be attributed to Bendel, whose in-store fashion... Read More

The fictions that underlie racism and how they affect the way Americans perceive reality are dissected in Sarah Lewis’s eye-opening history text, "The Unseen Truth". In his 1861 speech “Pictures and Progress,” Frederick Douglass... Read More