Solving murders is just a past-time, but luckily, she has a keen eye for details and knows what it means when a boot print with a gaping hole is discovered near the bodies of several Chinese workers....

Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago...

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years...

Like a storm waiting to break over a plain, Shakira Croce pulls at tensions and heartstrings in a debut collection filled with longing, wit, and intelligence...

The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son...

In The Last Interview, a famous but stressed Israeli writer finds that the only way he can write is by answering a set of interview questions sent from a website...

Inspired by Leona Woods, the only woman who worked on the Manhattan Project, Atomic Love (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) tells the story of Rosalind Porter, a physicist recruited by Enrico Fermi to join his team at the University of Chicago...

Melissa Valentine and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother.

In a set up reminiscent of the show Orphan Black, four feisty young women struggle to make their way in the world, unaware that they are related...

In Jasper Fforde’s "The Constant Rabbit," residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits...

In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain....

Set at the glittering Italianate court of King Zygmunt I of Poland/Lithuania and his son, Zygmunt August, these books map fictional plots onto real historical incidents to create fast-paced, fluid stories that are as much about the tensions of a culture in transition as what drives a person to commit murder....

A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020) is a collection of linked short stories, which Luis Alberto Urrea called “a world-class collection.”

At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player...

Kelly Harris-DeBerry creates the world anew from scraps of memories and rhythm...

In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.”

Jessica Gross is a valuable ally. An intuitive reader of Freud her debut novel--Hysteria (Unnamed Press, 2020)--embraces Oedipal conflict, unconscious fantasy, and voracious sexuality...

Most people think of Edgar Degas as a French painter of ballerinas. But few have heard that his mother came from New Orleans or that he spent five months in that city between October 1872 and February 1873...

Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed...

Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theatre...

"The New Wilderness" (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract....

Ann Dávila Cardinal writes stories that thrill you. She writes about lives that face challenge and find a way through, despite the horror that chases them. She writes about Puerto Rico and trauma and belonging somewhere...

While Arthur Nakai is attending a wake for a man he considered a brother with whom he served in the U.S. Marines, he receives a call from an old friend whose sons have just been murdered...

Premee Mohamed's Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) is simultaneously a far-flung horror story and an exploration of an intimate relationship....

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past...