Erika J. Simpson This Is Your Mother: A Memoir   Scribner / May 2025 / 213 pp / $27.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Josephine Greenfield / January 2026   “Imagine this is your mother, Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten.”   Thus begins Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir, This Is Your Mother , which tells the story of the traumatic childhood Simpson and her sister endured as their mother battled illness, poverty, and a recurring cycle of evictions from increasingly ru

Andrea Barrett Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction W.W. Norton & Company /2025 /189 pp / $26.99 Hardcover Reviewed by Amanda A. Gibson / December 2025  A few years ago, I grew fascinated with a nineteenth-century photographer, Anna Atkins, who used a photographic process called cyanotype, which employs sunshine and chemicals to make ethereal blue images. Although Atkins was the first to publish photographs, she is all but lost to history, overshadowed by male photog

Sarah Lampert, creator  Ginny & Georgia Netflix / 2021-present / TV-14 Reviewed by Raechel Sigur / October 2025 Checks and Balances: Ginny & Georgia In the world of streaming and binge-watching, Netflix’s  Ginny & Georgia stands out as a poignant, layered drama. Created by Sarah Lampert, Ginny & Georgia is a single-camera drama that traces the complicated bond between a teenage girl and her morally complex mother as they navigate identity, trauma, and the shadows of a tumul

A. Kendra Greene No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity   Tin House / March 2025 / 228 pp / $28.95 Reviewed by Laura Johnsrude / October 2025 In No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity, author and artist A. Kendra Greene marvels at the world—her personal, in-the-moment experiences—with luscious granularity. The title page notes the contents are “written and illuminated by A. Kendra Greene,” and a variety of shades-of-black images supplement the essays—ins

Michael Kelly, Editor Northern Nights Undertow Publications / 2024 / 296 pages / $20 Reviewed by V. A. Vazquez / October 2025   Michael Kelly’s anthology of Canadian horror fiction, Northern Nights , begins with a land acknowledgment. “I am a settler,” the editor professes, and it is this—the act of inhabiting, of intruding, of invading—that permeates most strongly throughout these twenty original short stories. There are few landscapes as brutal and savage as the Canadian wi

Arianna Rebolini   Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die   HarperCollins / April 2025 / 352 pp / $30 Hardcover   Reviewed by Hope...

Martín Espada Jailbreak of Sparrows Alfred A. Knopf / 2025 / 114 pp / $29 Hardback Reviewed by James Long / June 2025   About a third of...

Roisín O’Donnell Nesting Algonquin Books / February 2025 / 400 pp / $29.00 Hardcover Reviewed by pine breaks / April 2025 Nesting  is...

Diane Seuss Modern Poetry Graywolf Press / 2024 / 112 pp / $26.00 Reviewed by Melissa Shepherd / April 2025   In Modern Poetry , Diane...