Free will clashes with genetic experimentation in Kathryn Berla’s mind-bending science fiction novel, Ricochet. If you asked Tati, she would tell you that she’s a regular high school senior. An academic overachiever, she’s also... Read More

Melissa Hardy’s irreverent and funny novel "The Oracle of Cumae" is a layered tale wherein the present collides with the distant past. Coming to the end of her life, Mariuccia calls for a priest—but not because she wants to confess... Read More

Charming horror may sound like an oxymoron, but it is an apt description of Landis Blair’s whimsical graphic novel "The Envious Siblings". Inspired by the works of Edward Gorey, the eight macabre nursery rhymes tell tales of skeletal... Read More

California—land of golden dreams, proud melting pot, home to both the poor and the unimaginably rich—is an amalgam. Her complexities are captured in the essays of Freeman’s: California, which reaches across time and cultures to... Read More

The characters of Arthur Allen’s "The Nurseryman" follow the trail of Martin Frobisher, explorer of the great North, who “discovered” Meta Incognita, now part of Baffin Island. Written in sixteenth-century style, the book’s... Read More

One might assume that training brains towards perfection is a worthy goal, but German neuroscientist Henning Beck’s "Scatterbrain" promotes a different perspective. The book refutes received opinions about the brain’s apparent... Read More

In Mark Barr’s engrossing historical novel "Watershed", personal and social changes lead to tension in a rural Tennessee town where a post-Depression federal dam project brings work, strangers, and electricity to the region. Claire is... Read More