2025

A touching, humorous account of the author’s cultural reckoning with his Korean heritage and hidden family secrets. A surprising diagnosis of PTSD led Dave Gibbons to look to his past for clues to explain the unexpected result. Born to an American soldier and a Korean mother in the wake of the Korean War, Dave has spent his life struggling to blend his Korean roots and his very American upbringing. The family joins a conservative church that embraces a strict, rule-based faith, and they try to navigate life as one of the few mixed-raced families in their community. But when tragedy strikes, tearing the family apart, Dave is forced to face long- buried secrets that he can no longer ignore. As he explores his family’s difficult past, he confronts his own pain and the persistent feelings of not quite fitting in either in America or his mother’s home country. And when a DNA test ultimately reveals a truth that shatters everything he understood about his history, he begins the journey to reconcile his American upbringing with his deep Korean roots, and he is forced to confront the traumas he unknowingly carried. The Shape of My Eyes beautifully weaves historic reference points of the oppression and discrimination against Asian Americans with Dave’s own personal story. Dave’s wrestling with belonging in his family, in America, and in the church creates a raw, thought-provoking memoir about race, religion and finding home.

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family. Razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning and surprisingly tender, Luster by Raven Leilani is a painfully funny debut about what it means to be young now.

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

As the day dawns on the 50th annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck\-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight ... and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.