FINALIST FOR THE 2018 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD.  "I am my haint. I haunt my own body."In The Through, Adrian and her partner Ben navigate the strange and dangerous magic of The Through, an African American ghost town that exists somewhere between Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and the other-world of the flying slave ship Yemaya, peach Nehi sodas, and mothers back from the dead. Ben and Adrian are not in an ideal partnership--Adrian survived childhood sexual abuse and Hurricane Katrina, whileBen listlessly adjuncts at the local university. The Through, as folk call it,used to be called Okahika, a black community that existed without street names or formal recognition. Okahika exists in every Southern state, connected by energy and history, come and gone, waiting and leaving. Yemaya leads Ben and Adrian on a journey into The Through that ends in healing - but at a very high cost.

The Through

Johnson, A. Rafael

Literature & Fiction

Jaded Ibis Press, LLC

In a slightly alternate near-future, women are forming vigilante groups to wreak vengeance on rapists, child abusers, and murderers of women. Averil Parnell, a female Catholic priest, faces a dilemma: per the Golden Rule she should advise forgiveness, but as the lone survivor of an infamous massacre of women seminarians, she understands their anger. Her life becomes more complicated when she embarks on an obsessive affair with a younger man and grapples with disturbing religious visions. She had wanted to be a scholar, before the trauma of the massacre. Later, all she wanted was a quiet life as a parish priest. But now she finds she has become a mystic, and a central figure in the social upheaval that's gathering momentum all over the world. Kingdom of Women spans decades and delves into multiple points of view, not only highlighting the personal evolution of a complex, troubled individual but also exploring larger themes like the ethical implications of the use of violence against oppression, and the tension between justice and mercy, revenge and forgiveness.

Kingdom of Women

Kearns, Rosalie Morales

Religion & Spirituality

Set in Bangladesh and the United States, the eight stories in The Bird Catcher address gender expectations, familial love, and questions of identity and belonging.
 In “The Anomalous Wife,” when Nirjhara decides she wants to walk into the ocean, her husband of thirty years is confused: she has the perfect life, he insists, the life of a dutiful housewife and mother who wants for nothing in her adopted country. The staff at the psychiatric facility can’t even pronounce Nirjhara’s name, let alone understand her mordant humor and her use of wide-ranging literary references (from Rabindranath Tagore to Sylvia Plath to The Ancient Mariner) to describe her despair.
 The other stories are equally resonant and thought-provoking. A college professor has to contend with a student who “laughed every time I struggled on a word that didn’t want to come out of my forked tongue: one part third world, one part hyphenated American.” A young woman enjoys a loving but complicated relationship with her mother-in-law, a Bangladeshi immigrant who is both ebullient and opinionated, charming and exasperating. In the title story, drawing on fairy tale motifs, string theory, Sufi philosphy, and other traditions, a bird and a recluse argue over the nature of time and the meaning of freedom.
 The Bird Catcher offers wide-ranging variations on the theme of diasporic identity, intriguing glimpses into suppressed, fragmented, and resilient lives, and a meditation on the power and limitations of language. As Nirjhara explains in “The Anomalous Wife,” “Life is all about right word choices, right verbs, and right prepositions. If you walk by the ocean, you are a lover of life. If you walk into it out of your love for the ocean, you are kept here as a prisoner until you learn the correct use of prepositions.”

The Bird Catcher and Other Stories

Hasanat, Fayeza

United States

In this poetry collection, Samuel Miranda aims to capture and celebrate a life lived and lives encountered. Through observations and conversations, we're reminded that mundane events and minute moments in our everyday lives can and should be memorialized. Part portraiture, part social commentary, and part memory, Protection from Erasure is meticulously crafted with arresting dialogue, sincere lines, and raw reflections that knit together and hover upon the edge of a shared remembrance.

Protection from Erasure

Miranda, Sami

Poetry

Where does fiction begin and truth end? How does the telling of a white lie (adding or subtracting a year from one’s age) mutate into a darker complication (concealing a misdemeanor, stealing, or betraying a loved one)? Or worse, how does a small untruth transmogrify into a criminal act (fraud or attempted murder)? Moreover, when two different people are spinning the same narrative, whose version of the truth is to be believed? The excavation of an opaque past is the forensic aspect of this memoir, which attempts to answer such questions by uncovering the truth about one woman, Dolores Buxton, for whom the construction of artifice was so quotidian and whose lies became such a trap that, rather than tell the truth, she committed suicide. The story, set mostly in an ever-changing Manhattan, unfolds in reverse chronology. The memoir uses diaries, court transcripts and records, interviews, historical documents, and letters to reconstruct five pivotal events in Dolores Buxton’s life: her 1989 suicide; the 1969 Supreme Court decree that finalized her separation from her only child; a 1958 indictment for attempted murder; a day in 1953 as a young executive in the cosmetics industry (and the anniversary of her mother’s death of multiple sclerosis); and her birth in 1929 (on the eve of the Great Depression), to a Jewish confidence man and his younger, Catholic wife. Author Kim Dana Kupperman is Dolores’s daughter; her relentless probing unveils her mother’s bondage to the difficult legacy of her forebears. In the process of seeking to describe and grasp the constellation of circumstance and human interaction that results in criminal behavior, she attains, if not clear answers, at least a sense of redemption for having tried to understand what drove her mother to the desperation she chose to inhabit.

The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir

Self-Help

Kupperman, Kim Dana

Death & Grief

It’s 1977. Bannen, Georgia, nestled amid pine forests, is rife with contrasts: natural beauty and racial tension, small-town charm and long-term poverty. An unsettling place for a Black man who fled it years ago and has since traveled the world.
 But Greer Michaels has to come home, to care for his dying mother.
 And that means he’ll have to reckon with the devastating secret that drove him out in the first place.
 Greer’s story is intertwined with those of the people around him: His mother, Elizabeth, who once had a dazzling singing voice but fell silent years ago. Their neighbor Esse, who has turned to religion after her own traumatic past. Esse’s teenaged daughter, Ceiley, an insatiable reader with a burning curiosity about life beyond Bannen’s town limits.
 Written in spare and lyrical prose, As a River moves back and forth across decades, evoking the mysterious play of memory as it touches upon shame and redemption, despair and connection. An exploration of family secrets rooted in the turbulent history of the segregated South, As a River is ultimately about our struggles to understand each other, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

As a River

Dayson, Sion

"I wear a sash like a beauty queen," writes Carly Israel, "except mine reads Broken." A child of alcoholics and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Israel felt pressured to deny that anything was wrong at home. To the outside world she was an overachieving, straight-A student, but the reality included substance abuse starting at age nine, an eating disorder, exercising to the point of injury, and eventually, in college, a suicide attempt. The process of getting sober meant realizing how much she was affected by the traumas suffered by her parents and grandparents, and finding a version of God that made sense to her. With her newfound sobriety, Israel went on to finish college and graduate school, mentor other people in recovery, marry, and start a family. But her third child, Levi, developed serious medical complications that launched her on a years-long quest to get adequate diagnoses and treatments. As her marriage unraveled and her son's health challenges continued, Israel realized that her earlier conception of God needed to change: "I no longer believed," she writes, "that God had a plan for me and that every little piece of my life was laid out in detail. I no longer believed that everything happened for a reason. Now, I believed in a God that would give me all the support, love, strength, courage, and guidance I needed to get through each day." As she finds a soulmate and embarks on a new marriage and a reoriented relationship with God, she also begins a daily practice of gratitude. Throughout Seconds and Inches are thank-you letters that Israel has written to loved ones and supportive friends, but also to schoolyard bullies and uncaring medical personnel, all of whom have taught her important lessons and helped her become the person she is: "a badass, sparkly, lit-up, on fire, brutally honest, potty-mouthed, tattooed woman." As Jennifer Pastiloff writes in her foreword to the book, when you've finished reading this "haunting and beautiful" memoir, "you will want to go out and live fully. You will want to stop hiding and accept your imperfect, perfect self. You will want to start telling the truth about who you are." A story of recovery and transformation, Seconds and Inches is also a thoughtful reflection on generational trauma, gratitude, and forgiveness.

Seconds and Inches

Biographies & Memoirs

Israel, Carly

Memoirs

In this collection of short stories that focuses on the modern-day experiences of Indigenous people living in Oklahoma, Johnston documents the quiet sorrow of everyday life as her characters traverse the normalized, heartbreaking rites of passage such as burying your grandfather, mother, or husband, becoming a sex worker, or reconnecting with your family after prison; the effects are subtle, yet loud, and always enduring. Whether Johnston's characters are coming of age and/or grappling with complex family dynamics, Johnston delivers the economy of loss and resilience that marks this post-colonial collection with biting, captivating prose that demands to be read from start to finish.

Rites

Johnston, Savannah

We first meet Angie Rubio at age five, being scolded by her kindergarten teacher for not knowing how to skip properly. Set in California in the 1960s and '70s, Guided Tours in Living Color takes Angie year by year from kindergarten through high school, offering a portrait of the artist as a shy, awkward Mexican-American girl. Taking place against the backdrop of the Cold War and civil rights eras--the Cuban missile crisis, the Watts riots, Beatlemania, the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics--Guided Tours in Living Color also surveys the milestones of American girlhood. We see Brownies, slumber parties, training bras, cheerleader tryouts, and proms through the eyes of a "brown, skinny, and bespectacled" Latina who soon learns that pageant winners as well as high school cheerleaders are always white. Angie is relegated to the fringes of the popular cliques at school, led by opinionated girls whose self-confidence seems as unattainable to her as their perfect teeth and blonde hair. But Angie resists internalizing societal messages about who is beautiful, important, and valid. When a white classmate is cast as Juliet in the school play, she can't resist taunting Angie with "Don't forget who the heroine of this play is," to which Angie replies: "She dies in the end." In "the unfun funhouse that was high school," Angie decides to reinvent herself. Reminding herself to "be bold, be heard, be provocative," she writes articles for the student newspaper raising critical questions about venerable institutions like homecoming, prom, and the tradition of naming students "most likely to succeed," "best looking," and so forth. Guided Tours in Living Color traces Angie's formation as a writer, from the child who loves Scrabble and jots down new words she learns in a notebook to the teenager publishing controversial opinions about success and belonging, a person whose voice is now "loud-enough-to-be-heard."

Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories

Miscolta, Donna

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Sickness, a disease with unknown origins, is killing white children in the antebellum South, but Perpetua, a Black enslaved woman, is facing something much more devastating: Her daughter Meenie is missing. What she finds in her search for her child will change her life forever.\nBy fusing the past and present with the power of prose and poetry, Leslie T. Grover poignantly explores the ripple effect of history and the nature of love and family and the ties that bind.

The Benefits of Eating White Folks

Grover, Leslie T

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