Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it?

It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed. And all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho.” So begins Selby Wynn Schwartz’s debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths. In 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes, “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives.

Abby, a young feminist economist, is anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting the next day on optimism and John Maynard Keynes. So she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting, albeit imaginary, companion to keep her on track --- Keynes himself. Yet, as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks. Instead she undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and hopeful imaginations.

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Smithy decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn’t just a writer of forgotten children’s stories. The Twyford Code holds a great secret, and Smithy may just have the key.

Graham Patterson’s life has hit a dead end. His career as a comedian is failing. The love of his life recently broke up with him, and he literally has no idea what to do next. With nothing to lose, he buys a new car and hits the road, planning to drive across the country and hopefully figure out his next moves before reaching California. But along the way, Patterson does something his old self would never have even considered: he gets tattooed by a brilliant tattoo artist in North Carolina. The decision sets off a series of extraordinary events that changes his life forever. Among other things, Patterson is gifted with the ability to see in real time three different lives that are available to him. The choice is his: The life he is leading right now, or two very different ones.

The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. STAYED ON FREEDOM brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.

Behind the events you know are the killers you don’t. When diplomacy fails, we're the ones who gear up. Officially we don’t exist, but every government in the world uses our services. We’ve been saving the world for 100 years. Sixteen people have done this job before me. I am Seventeen. The most feared assassin in the world. But to be the best, you must beat the best. My next target is Sixteen, just as one day Eighteen will hunt me down. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and it gets lonely at the top. Nobody gets to stay for long. But while we're here, all that matters is that we win.