Shadow Life

Poet and novelist Hiromi Goto effortlessly blends wry, observational slice-of-life literary fiction with poetic magical realism in the tender and surprising graphic novel Shadow Life, with haunting art from debut artist Ann Xu. When Kumiko’s well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it’s not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret even while communicating online with her eldest daughter. Kumiko revels in the small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence—Death’s shadow. Kumiko’s sweet life is shattered when Death’s shadow swoops in to collect her. With her quick mind and sense of humor, Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life. But how long can an old woman thwart fate?

Recounts the plight of the Frank family, including their years in Germany, their flight to Amsterdam, their two years in hiding, their eventual discovery, the deaths of Anne, her sister and mother, and the survival of Otto Frank.

Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.

Melanie Tamaki is an outsider. The only child of a loving but neglectful mother is just barely coping with school and with life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by the vindictive Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie begins an epic and darkly fantastical journey to save her parents. What she does not yet realize is that the future of the universe depends upon her success.

The Bronte siblings—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne—find escape from their constrained lives via their rich imaginations. The glittering world of Verdopolis and the romantic and melancholy world of Gondal literally come to life under their pens, offering the sort of romance and intrigue missing from their isolated parsonage home. But at what price? As Branwell begins to descend into madness and the sisters feel their real lives slipping away, they must weigh the cost of their powerful imaginations, even as the characters they have created—the brooding Rogue and dashing Duke of Zamorna—refuse to let them go. Gorgeously written and based on the Brontes’ juvenilia, Worlds of Ink and Shadow brings to life one of history’s most celebrated literary families in a thrilling, suspenseful fantasy.

A patriotic love story, an unlikely romantic adventure, behind the scenes in aviation history. Based on real life. Joe Ware was a man of national note, a conservative Republican Christian 40 years older, and I was private, a liberal Democrat Jewish transsexual. He was former Lockheed Skunk Works, who helped make the first two Air Force Ones for President Eisenhower and who was Depart-ment Manager of Engineering Flight Test over the U-2, and the SR-71; I was a social worker and, before that, in the National Security Agency, NSGA, NSOC, SIGINT, Ft. Meade, Mary-land. Shadow Life: Aerospace, Love, and Secrets is a beautiful romance between two people in a mixed marriage, fighting to stay together, corrects popular misconceptions about transgender and transsexual living, and makes a suggestion. I've been in this since the 1970s, I've lived the life, and I've helped others. Inspired by Kenji Yoshino (Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, 2006), I'm concerned about the current direction of the transgender paradigm: It's still hiding key stigmata. I know where the bodies are buried. I've done it myself. I tried to keep my sexuality away from other people's concern, but there is no such thing as actual stealth living. People knew. I wouldn't discuss it, and my husband and I caught hell for years. Now I see most transgender people doing the same thing in another way, unwittingly enabling prejudice and opposition they don't handle any better than I did. It's not the fact they're transgender they're hiding but what they really need or desire. The transgender movement is winning access to places most don't even want to go, where dis-robing is required. If they can't say it, they can't show it. So they don't go, marginalizing them-selves into a less than equal integration, furthering lack of awareness, preventing equal em-ployment, and where it's discovered during sex, possibly even incurring surprise violence or murder. Trans people can never fully integrate into society if we're embarrassed to embrace ourselves. Leaders of the social movement cannot advocate for something they downplay. They need to bring these issues to the fore, not leave them to serve as doubt and denial, not relegate them to the periphery or treat questions as offensive. Rhetoric must be as clear in media as it would be in locker rooms so that those who are interested may more fully integrate. I've waited 20 years for leaders to do so. Most of them don't, so I did, herein. Shadow Life is explicit.

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery. For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.

A fully illustrated guide to Deborah Harkness's #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls series—“an irresistible . . . wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy” (People). Look for the hit series “A Discovery of Witches,” now streaming on AMC+, Sundance Now, Shudder, and Max! A Discovery of Witches introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont. Shadow of Night and The Book of Life carried Deborah Harkness's series to its spellbinding conclusion. In The World of All Souls, Harkness shares the rich sources of inspiration behind her bewitching novels. She draws together synopses, character bios, maps, recipes, and even the science behind creatures, magic, and alchemy—all with her signature historian's touch. Bursting with fascinating facts and dazzling artwork, this essential handbook is a must-have for longtime fans and eager newcomers alike.