High Tech

These stories cover a wide array of experiences, locations, and characters, all in Provincetown, Massachusetts. One story about the Feast of Saint Bonaventure follows multiple, different characters throughout the evening, showing readers what the Feast means to each of them. Some characters have supernatural aspects; Luna, the “Queen of Land’s End,” is a trans woman who’s lived in Provincetown since the late 1800s who acts as kind of a guardian angel for locals, but also for the town itself. Without her, who would keep the tides in sync? Throughout, the various players are funny and vibrant, but sometimes they really do feel like fictional constructs than real people. They serve as representatives of a vibrant mix of communities, but the stories sometimes read more like parables than complex portraits. Provincetown is the real focus, and the tales are strongest when they talk directly about the locale; readers get to know its festivals, its summer routines, its struggles during the of...

When Callie aces her Briarwood entrance exam (thanks in part to having studied the science journal belonging to her great-grandfather Teodore Gartzia, who worked with Nikola Tesla), her teacher accuses her of cheating and withholds her results from the contest. But when a personal invitation arrives from the camp director, her summer takes an unexpected turn. Knowing her proud father will reject the much-needed scholarship, Callie agrees to earn her way by working as an assistant mechanic, helping to keep the steam-powered machines humming. Briarwood isn’t about typical summer camp activities like kayaking and crafts—it’s filled with mechanical marvels and science in which “inspiration and creativity combine in weird and wonderful ways to produce something unexpected.” As she navigates new friendships, self-doubt, and a missing-persons mystery, Callie comes to realize that innovation depends on both intelligence and learning to trust and work with others. The camp setting is vividly i...

In this revealing and dishy memoir, Rinna leads with intense family trauma, describing the tragic losses of her beloved mother, Lois, from a stroke in 2021, as well as intimately detailing her father’s assisted suicide and her half-sister’s accidental overdose at age 21. Rinna attributes her Season 12 departure from Bravo’s  Real Housewives of Beverly Hills  to the immense grief and repressed anger she was processing while trying to film episodes for the series and keep her composure intact. Her on-camera appearances became rage-filled and volatile; she posted about them on social media, and they collectively drove home the fact that her relationship with the  Real Housewives  franchise has always been complicated. Rinna’s juicy ordeals with Bravo form the simmering centerpieces of the book, giving fans what they want most, despite the author’s attempts to dispense early-career highlights or perspectives on how she lost her mojo in her 30s but regained her power in ...

It’s no surprise that a book called Brawler should provoke, ambush, and, yes, gut-punch its readers. Those familiar with Groff’s supple fiction will expect this, combined with startling, pinpoint sentences: “Human decency could still overcome hunger, then.” These nine stories follow her earlier collections, Delicate Edible Birds (2009) and Florida (2018); the stories in Florida , named after her adopted home state, crackle with the urgency of precarious lives, and won the Story Prize. This latest is more geographically diffuse but still aflame with combustible characters in harrowing corners. The first story, “The Wind,” has a prosaic title and a haunting, generational imprint as three small children and their mother use the yellow school bus as cover to try to escape domestic violence. The perpetrator, their father, is a cop; their allies work with their mother at the local hospital. In 18 pages, the title lifts into stunning poignancy and leaves the reader breathless. The final s...

Finley Minor has always considered himself a boring sort, aside from the fact that he’s had accurate premonitions of the future since he was a child. He’s mostly learned to ignore them, except for the ones that help him as a market analyst. While undergoing hypnotherapy after being dumped by his long-time girlfriend, he has a vision unlike anything he’s ever experienced; he’s not just seeing the future, he’s in it, inhabiting the body of Wallace Deng Moroz in the year 2131, searching for an artifact (a crucifix called the ikona) that’s supposed to lead everyone to Shambhala. (“If we find it, we can lead humankind to a new world, of perfect health, longevity.”) Finley isn’t the only one searching for the ikona: In Hong Kong, Jia Li wants the artifact to heal her mother, who’s been poisoned; in Atlanta, Kate Davies unwittingly ends up with the crucifix after a client leaves his coat in her home. As the pieces, and people, start coming together, Kate realizes that everything’s tied to an...

The hamlet of Meat Cove gets its name from the carcasses that marauding Vikings once tossed into the sea at the northern tip of Cape Breton. Fundy Sutherland, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lives a complicated life there with her 16-year-old daughter, Skye, and her married lover, Pascal. She also has a secret past as a Canadian Armed Forces “sniper with kills on four continents.” Her cruel mother, Geneva, who had a temper that “could melt a Coke bottle,” ran off on Fundy’s fifth birthday, leaving her alone with an alcoholic, unemployed father. After a well-off local family with three boys took her in, Fundy became fiercely competitive, excelling in sports and winning the Junior National Championship in the biathlon. Skye’s latest school assignment, requiring an at-home DNA test, sends Fundy into panic mode, as it could reveal aspects of her life that she’d rather stay hidden. In addition, a criminal whom Fundy helped to put in prison six years ago has been released—and...

Dark-haired, dark-eyed Amira Shah is a barista and debate club prodigy whose biggest problems should be her college applications and ex-boyfriend, Kaidan Jaziri. But when she sees Kaidan arguing with a strange man in the alley behind Deja Brew before vanishing into “an eddy of swirling, shifting air,” she’s concerned for his safety and goes after him. Amira finds herself in Duat, where Kaidan reveals himself to be a Descendant of Apep, the Old Egyptian god of Chaos. Soon she learns that Descendants are being hunted. Despite being warned about the dangers, she’s intrigued by Duat—"a place beyond her little city, one filled with temples and magic and mystery”—and she insists on joining Kaidan’s mission to catch the culprit. The deeper they dig, the more they discover about both Amira’s family history and the identity of the murderer. Soren’s debut deftly fuses Egyptian mythology with modern teen anxieties—framing friendship, betrayal, and first love against a backdrop of cosmic sta...

This visual essay book, featuring full-color photographs taken by National Geographic  photojournalist Yüyan, documents conservation practices by Indigenous communities in nine different parts of the world: Alaska, Palau, Ecuador, Mongolia, Australia, Greenland, California, Alberta–Montana, and Vancouver Island. Each location corresponds with a specific conservation effort—such as the Iñupiats’ efforts to restore the bowhead whale population in Alaska or the Cofáns’ attempts to preserve the rainforest in Ecuador—and is addressed in an essay by one of a group of writers (including an activist, a politician, and a bestselling author) detailing the work being done. These brief essays introduce terms like “traditional ecological knowledge” (which is essentially “the fine-grained, practical understanding that comes from centuries of experience in a specific landscape”) and include quotes from the people directly involved in the conservation efforts. The majority of the book consists of...

Gren Moritz is the newly elected Chief Minister for the Nations of Rivennia, and the first from Varcega. Varcegians believe in tradition; they eat farmed meat and practice arranged marriages (Gren’s wife, Lorelei, was carefully chosen by his grandparents). Gren’s main platform is “protecting humanity from the rise of ultrahumanism,” but his initial bill may prove controversial—it proposes sterilization for anyone planning gene enhancement treatments, ensuring that unwanted mutations can’t spread. Gren’s not the only one in charge. Rivennia has a monarch, but the science-worshipping Human Order, with its Supreme Leader Igor Voychenko, appears to wield the real power. At a dinner Gren reluctantly attends, he’s introduced to the Liffdom Lodges, Voychenko’s amoral secret society. Gren’s pressured to play a game, wagering on the date of Queen Brynhilda’s death. His competitors are also newcomers: washed-up supermodel Primula Zhang, now the face of fast-fashion brand Skitto, and a low-level...

The cloud brings with it an overpowering “stench of rot and ruin” and seems to move with malicious intent. It leaves those it encounters covered in a mysterious yellow slime—if it doesn’t completely eviscerate them first. The novel weaves back and forth from the late 19th century to the near future, slowly unfolding the image of a relentless, growing horror that, despite the intervention of a mysterious division of the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually tears its way through Rhode Island and threatens to stretch far beyond. An ensemble cast of characters helps ground the horror and intrigue with intimate relationships and personal stakes in connection with the carnage. Memorable characters include the Gilded Age butler Wilcox Jennings, who finds himself transported to the 21st century after an encounter with the yellow fog, and Cy Warren, the overworked supervisor of a mental health hospital who finds himself dealing with problems that go far beyond anything he could have imagine...

What if the best way to get better at something was simply to measure your progress every day? According to the authors, the secret to self-improvement is self-measurement. “By tracking even the smallest things you want to change, you’ll create a road map for progress one step at a time,” they write. “It’ll take two minutes a day, cost you absolutely nothing, and help you get better at almost anything.” That’s the theory behind Goldsmith’s Daily Questions, a practice he began to check in with himself—and his goals—once each day to assess his progress and make alterations when necessary. He has since shared the practice with many of his successful clients. Citing self-improvement experts like Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin, the authors argue that future perfection matters less than tangible progress today and tomorrow. But the Daily Questions are harder than they may seem at first, and not simply because they require sticking to a routine. It can be tough to confront oneself wit...

Joseph “Breeze” Bye, a wheelchair-bound former professional baseball player, is on the cusp of finding major success in his second, post-accident career: painting. Breeze paints portraits of great pitchers—players who are as good as he was, before he was the victim of a hit-and-run. As a major exhibition of his work in New York City approaches, he gets a call from a former associate who confesses to being the person who ran him down. This admission kicks off the protagonist’s examination of his own life, told from a close first-person perspective in a long series of free associations; the narrative manages to maintain a tight focus while touching on a surprising variety of recollections. Breeze slowly unpacks his athletic career, his marriage, his extramarital affairs, his trajectory as an artist, his relationship with his daughter, and the circumstances surrounding his disability. The varied facets merge and dissipate with a flowing, casual logic that never leaves the reader behind. ...

This informative, enjoyable dual biography ably mines its titular superstars’ many contrasts. Moses Malone was a taciturn teenager when he made his 1974 debut in the American Basketball Association (ABA), a league known for its red-white-and-blue basketball, frequent financial troubles, and high-flying virtuosos like Julius “Dr. J” Erving, one of the sport’s “most eloquent” personalities. Charting careers that coincided with a 1983 NBA title for the Philadelphia 76ers, Epplin shows us underappreciated sides of his famed subjects. Erving was among the most elegant of players, “the legitimizer of playground improvisation” whose powerful dunks went largely unwitnessed due to the ABA’s lack of TV contracts. He worked hard to boost basketball’s marketability and to correct misapprehensions about Black athletes, “ask[ing] friends to sit with him during interviews and then critique his performance, pointing out every misstep and verbal tic.” Malone was neither balletic nor interested in talk...

As Sampson reflects in a pardonable understatement, “Bad things have happened to the Cross family before.” So what’s left to suffer now that Sampson has rescued Cross from a near-fatal bullet wound? Glad you asked. When his son Damon’s academic advisor phones from Chapel Hill to report that nobody’s seen Damon for three days, Cross instantly arranges to fly to North Carolina with his wife, investigator Bree Stone. But she’s called back to Washington almost immediately to work on a series of bombings that’s already prevented Sampson from joining Cross in the search for his son. Both investigations are thoroughly routine—that is, spiked with menace and violence and cast with characters you wouldn’t look at twice in a police lineup—but Patterson’s fondness for bite-sized chapters suits the structure of Cross’ latest adventure to a T, since there’s an opportunity for a cliffhanger of greater or lesser proportions every five pages or so, when the collaborating authors cut away to the other...

In London, circa 1809, Alaina Sinclair, daughter of the Earl of Norwich, is making her debut at the city’s classiest balls (her prospects are helped by her gorgeousness but hindered by her scandalous habit of reading books). Heading her dance card is Graham Wallace, the Duke of Ashford, who is tall, dark, great looking, rich, kind, polite, and actively hunting a wife. Complicating matters is Graham’s best friend and ballroom wingman Christopher Kendall, the Marquess of Rochester, who is tall, blond, blue-eyed, great-looking, rich, gruff, and disdainful of marriage. (He and Alaina meet cute when he stumbles into her at the refreshments table; she calls him a drunk, and he calls her ill-mannered.) Naturally, Alaina falls for the brooding rogue Christopher while being officially courted by Graham, leading to tense scenes in which she’s supposed to be flirting with the duke but can’t help gazing into the marquess’ eyes, their hearts aflutter. Christopher proves his worth (saving Alaina wh...

This book, part of a series that pairs authors with common objects and ideas, views the ballot through a topical, politically progressive lens. A novelist and poll worker, Enjeti pens evocative opening pages linking her childhood participation in mock elections to her “reverence for the right to vote.” Another engaging chapter zips through the etymological, social, and technological history of ballots. Mostly, though, Enjeti is interested in the current state of the franchise, recounting her experience supporting Democrats while living in Republican-heavy places. Her observations illustrate how voting has changed due to conservative-friendly court rulings and “an avalanche of voting restrictions” enacted after Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Her local drop box was among those that Georgia eliminated in 2022, making it harder to cast absentee votes. Statewide, Georgia made it illegal to offer refreshments to voters in line near polling places. Meanwhile, gerrymande...

When her parents announce they “are moving to the West,” Ren’s impending separation from her beloved storyteller grandmother leaves her trembling. But Popo gives her a special pencil and tells her, “You will make your own magic there.” Still, whirling words and unusual colors underscore the realization that she’s “far from home.” Suddenly, she’s called Lauren. Cutting her long hair means that “even the face in the mirror look[s] unfamiliar.” Worst of all, Ren can’t see herself in the stories contained in her new books. But Popo’s magic emanates from Ren’s pencil, and though she may not always find the right words, she can use it to make her own stories come alive: Sharing new experiences with new friends lets her imagine stories where she truly belongs. Taiwanese American author/illustrator Lu’s softly whimsical pencil and watercolor illustrations get “a little help from Nora Ren Toft,” Lu’s real-life daughter, who provides the drawings that young Ren creates. Lu empathically mirrors ...

The Anaconda Plan, devised by Union Gen. Winfield Scott, proposed suffocating the Southern ports along the Mississippi with naval blockades. In the center of the Anaconda lay the port of New Orleans, the setting for Ellis’ novel. It’s here, in April of 1862, that we meet Rachel Durand, a young Jewish widow who has lost her husband, Levi, in the Battle of Shiloh. Rachel lives with her younger, pregnant sister Sarah, whose husband, Jacob Mercier, is still away at war. Within a few days, the Union overtakes the Confederate barriers and begins its occupation of New Orleans. Gen. Benjamin “Spoons” Butler—locally referred to as the Beast—is put in charge of the city. When he has the Stars and Stripes hung at City Hall, it provokes a small citizen revolt with dire consequences. Rebellions continue, only more secretly. Months later, with the city suffering from devastating shortages, Jacob returns home severely injured. It’s now up to Rachel to provide for her small family. This is how she fi...