This collection of some 40 pieces brought together by writer, translator, and filmmaker Valente offers up an eclectic, daunting overview of the life and career of the singular free-jazz composer, performer, and poet Cecil Taylor. As Gary Giddins puts it in his fine essay, “The Avant-Gardist Who Came in From the Cold,” Taylor inherited a…
Thirty-one-year-old Ezzie Halevi is used to life behind the scenes. As a producer for The Wake Up Show, she’s rarely the one anyone is watching, which is why she can’t stop thinking about her recent encounter with Lee Morgan. Lee, a handsome TV chef 10 years Ezzie’s senior, steals the hearts of viewers and his…
Kawamura Haruki is already a sailor, but the wartime Imperial Japanese Navy sends him to New Georgia, part of the Solomon Islands. His brothers are in the war also, and he holds a treasured letter from one of them, folded neatly and kept hidden in his pants cuff. He’s originally from a farm outside of…
Designed for the reader whose “nightstand is a graveyard of self-help bestsellers” and whose “calendar is color-coded” with an optimized morning routine yet still struggles with exhaustion, Tese’s book offers a Christian alternative to clichéd lifehacks. The premise is rooted in the author’s belief that Millennial and early-Gen Z adults have been lured into a…
Basho’s wife one day found herself with a serious travel bug. Soon Cesca convinced her husband to quit his day job to take an excursion to the East, partly inspired by his fascination with Eastern philosophies. The travelogue begins in Australia, but the nitty gritty starts in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The people they meet…
Life in small-town Pennsylvania in 1965 is starting to reflect concerns reverberating across the country: The shadows of World War II remain, with the specter of Nazis who escaped justice lingering; the effects of the more recent Korean war are still felt; and on the home front, second-wave feminism is changing the dynamics of the…
Even before the reader meets upstanding Mark Greenley, former star college athlete and current dedicated paramedic and Little League coach, a murky opening chapter titled The Librarian introduces two blind men in a vaguely described room full of files that are labeled in braille, whose contents aren’t in braille—so the men can retrieve the files,…
“This book is a transmission,” the author declares, not a memoir, though his life serves as the “evidence and the vehicle” for that transmission. Drawing on experiences spanning military service, practicing tax law, and impressive strength training, he urges readers to choose “the harder right over the easier option.” As a teenager, Timothy emigrated with…
In this novel’s version of planet Earth’s distant future, much like our contemporary world, some have rejected artificial intelligence and technology, while others seek to hasten humanity’s transformation. But in Vaughn’s accelerated dystopian society, humanity remains threatened by the Geometry, a mysterious superintelligence capable of erasing entire populations. After an amnesiac woman bursts from a…
The book opens in 1995 with Yacoobi on a bus bound for Afghanistan; she was returning to the country for the first time in more than two decades. She knew that her mission to set up clandestine schools for girls would almost certainly lead to her being “arrested, tortured, or killed on the spot” if…