Urban Creatures skirts the edge of reality, dexterously defying form and genre. Primal urges feed on the city, stalking its inhabitants. From a psychotherapist gorging on tragedy, to a predatory hair thief, and a grief-stricken father’s search for his lost daughter, humanity’s subterranean secrets and shames are unearthed. Urban survival makes creatures of us all. Sarah Gray's short stories shift from the unsettling to the surreal to the frightening, all cut through with her characteristic black humor.

Urban Creatures

New York Times bestselling author Mira Grant, author of the renowned Newsflesh series, returns with a novel that takes us to a new world of ancient mysteries and mythological dangers come to life. . The ocean is home to many myths, . But some are deadly. . .. Seven years ago the Atargatis set off on a voyage to the Mariana Trench to film a mockumentary bringing to life ancient sea creatures of legend. It was lost at sea with all hands. Some have called it a hoax; others have called it a tragedy. . Now a new crew has been assembled. But this time they're not out to entertain. Some seek to validate their life's work. Some seek the greatest hunt of all. Some seek the truth. But for the ambitious young scientist Victoria Stewart this is a voyage to uncover the fate of the sister she lost. . Whatever the truth may be, it will only be found below the waves. . But the secrets of the deep come with a price.

Into the Drowning Deep

Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.. The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things―the strange and the unexplainable―began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.. As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?. Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

Model Home: A Novel

Two starred reviews! “Achingly touching, heartfelt, and true, Brynn’s story of reinvention and self-discovery resonates on every page. A book to savor and hold dear.” —Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces and The Agathas For fans of Talia Hibbert and Lynn Painter comes an “emotionally rich” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and unflinchingly honest story about a teen who must come to terms with her disability and what it means for her identity, her love life, and her future.. Brynn Kwan is desperate for her high school persona to be real. That Brynn is head of the yearbook committee, the favorite for prom queen, and definitely not crumbling from a secret disability that’s rapidly wearing her down. If no one knows the truth about her condition, Brynn doesn’t have to worry about the pitying looks or accusations of being a faker that already destroyed her childhood friendships. She’s even willing to let go of her four-year relationship with her first love, Oliver, rather than reveal that a necessary surgery was the reason she ignored his existence for the entire summer. But after Brynn tries to break up a fight at a pep rally and winds up barred from all her clubs and senior prom, she has nothing left to prop up her illusion of being just like everyone else. During a week-long suspension from school, she realizes that she doesn’t quite recognize the face in the mirror—and it’s not because of her black eye from the fight. With a healthy sister who simply doesn’t understand and a confused ex-boyfriend who won’t just take a hint and go away like a normal human being, Brynn begins to wonder if it’s possible to reinvent her world by being the person she thought no one wanted: herself.

Conditions of a Heart

Finalist for the Palestine Book AwardsA brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

ALL GODS MUST DIE in this searingly relevant YA from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Bargain and Most Ardently. In a world bound by violence, a teen descended from the god of Death must keep their true identity a secret as they fight their way through a gladiator-style competition towards victory and rebellion against the gods who murdered their family.. Years ago, the descendants of the god of Death were murdered. The few that remain are in hiding, including Crow, a teen who survived the genocide and hides their magic to stay alive. After fleeing their village, Crow now lives with their uncles in the lowest part of the city: the Shallows.. Life in the Shallows is tough, but Crow’s even tougher. Hiding their magic has made Crow resourceful, cunning, and unbeatable -- which comes in handy as a fighter in the city's lucrative underground fighting ring.. Then, Crow's uncles are arrested for harboring Deathchildren. . With fists tightly clenched, Crow vows to set their uncles free. But to do that, they’re going to need to enter a world that threatens Crow’s very existence. Carefully navigating the politics of the wealthy and powerful, they enter the Tournament of the Gods -- a gladiator-style competition where the winner is granted a favor. As they battle their way towards the winner’s circle, Crow plans to ask the gods for their uncles’ freedom as their reward.. But in a city of gods and magic, you don’t ask for what you want.. You take it.. Action. Adventure. Romance. Find it all in Gabe Cole Novoa's novels:The Wicked BargainThe Diablo's Curse

These Vengeful Gods

A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout.. When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online.. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela's diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary.. In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.

Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir

A moving and provocative graphic memoir exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream.Solomon Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’ exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated.Alongside the Levis’ propulsive journey across Europe and to the United States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and connected periods of colonial history. Heavyweight asks us to consider how the patterns of history emerge and reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers. Confronting the specters of violence as both historian and descendent, this book is an exploration of family mythology, intergenerational memory, and the mark the past makes on the present.In conversation with works by Rebecca Hall, Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and Leela Corman, Heavyweight will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the chronicle of woven human stories.

Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory

FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER. “A once-in-a-generation voice.” – Vulture “One of our greatest living writers.” – Shondaland. A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times bestselling author, “a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self” (Esquire). In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal. . Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes Emezi's fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

Teen fashionista Ayana always believed she’d go to hell and back for her sister, Sabrina, but she never thought it would be so literal. After a family dinner where Sabrina’s boyfriend, Damian, is replaced by a shape-shifting mirror demon that’s out for her soul, Ayana is forced to put her designing dreams on hold to become the chic demon-slayer her sister needs.Unfortunately, demon hunting isn’t as easy as sprinkling holy water around, especially after she has a brush with death and is rescued by sweet, musical Carter. Not only is he charming and handsome, but suddenly he’s popping up everywhere, distracting her from her mission. Just as she starts to fall for him, coincidences begin to pile up, Ayana realizes that Carter and Damian’s sudden appearances in her life may not be due to chance after all. Perhaps the two are more intertwined than she thought.To save her sister and protect her heart, Ayana is forced to team up with her disaster cousin, her baking-obsessed best friend, and her eccentric guardian angel to confront the one thing she hadn’t been expecting to fight: love.In this stylish, laugh-out-loud story of sisterhood and self-acceptance, Ayana learns to face the demon in the mirror, and that sometimes, you can fall in love for the hell of it.

Love Be Damned

How do you design a system of government from scratch when you've lost faith in government itself?Carrie Davenport, a renowned constitutional law professor, has the career opportunity of a lifetime. Project Mars, the brainchild of a billionaire tech tycoon, has ambitious plans to establish the first human settlement on Mars. And Project Mars selected her—a Black, queer, publicity-shy professor in North Carolina—to design a system of government for the colony.Carrie eagerly researches how to craft a suitable constitution for space. But when she is stopped by the police one evening in a case of mistaken identity, the filmed encounter thrusts Carrie into a spotlight she never asked for, putting her at the center of the discourse on racial justice in the US. Suddenly, American democracy doesn’t seem like a shining beacon to carry into space. Carrie must decide whether to speak up—against the police brutality she endured, the tech-bro culture of Project Mars, and an even deeper underbelly of corruption behind the mission.Can Carrie regain faith in herself and in society to craft the “government of the future” and prevent the prejudices of Earth from tainting human life beyond?An inventive and thought-provoking work of contemporary fiction exploring social justice, law, and moral courage.

Arc of the Universe

The first-ever memoir of a child’s experience in detention on the US/Mexico border under President Trump’s infamous family separation policy.D Esperanza was just thirteen years old when he lost his caregivers, his beloved grandmother and uncle. Since both of his parents were working and living in the United States, D was left on his own in a small town in Honduras. He quickly realized he simply could not make enough money to survive so he made the difficult decision to head north with his cousins and hopefully reunite with his parents in el norte. Together, the boys struggled to survive a long and treacherous journey through Central America and Mexico. Along the way, D and his cousins formed a deep bond, only for the four to be brutally separated at the border of the United States. When he is captured and processed at a facility, neither D nor his family are given an update on when he will be released or where he’ll go next. Over the next five months, he kept a journal of his experience. The pages tell a story of pain, cruelty, friendship, and resilience, a living testament to the reality of the border. Amidst the senseless inhumanity and violence of US immigration policy, D found hope in the friendship he and his fellow companions forged, and mentorship from one intrepid advocate who fought on his behalf named Gerardo Iván Morales. Timely, powerful, and unforgettable, Detained brings the border crisis to vivid life.

Detained: A boy's journal of survival and resilience

Celestial

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Reading is better in community, and I’m grateful to welcome you to mine! I’ve been a content creator most of my life & an avid reader my entire life. Celestial is our home base to celebrate imaginative stories from galaxy-wide voices. (Think: fantasy, horror, sci-fi, magical realism & beyond.) I love being playful with my recommendations, but I always read with intention – this is a discerning and deliberately diverse space. Join my chaotic community … and let’s have fun while uplifting all voices. 

steph ✨ 📚 ✡︎ (@starrysteph)

Hi! I'm Steph. You can mostly find me on booktok (@starrysteph). I love reading & sharing book reviews and recommendations.

book reviews & recs 📚 • animal lover 🐇 • actor & content creator 🎭
