Adult

After the unexpected death of their mother, Felicia Morgan Weston, her five daughters are summoned to a historic Connecticut farmhouse for the reading of her will. Charlotte, the oldest, always resented her mother’s advice, but now misses her terribly. An entrepreneur and single mother, she doesn’t dare hope for a second chance at love. Quinne is content with her career as a TV producer and her life with her partner in Greenwich Village. Former ballet dancer Olivia has lived as a paraplegic since a car accident 12 years ago. Despite her mother’s disapproval, Veronica resigned herself to a secret relationship with an ambitious married senator. Happily married mother of three Isabelle has just found out that her husband is having an affair with his much younger intern. Each sister is about to receive a gift beyond her wildest dreams from their very private but loving mother.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona. Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

Beautiful, cunning Verbena Montrose must marry to save herself and her odious family from abject poverty. Fortunately, what she lacks in a dowry, she makes up for in the currency of gossip. When she hears an alarming rumor about her very dear, very queer friend Étienne that could ruin him, she comes to his aid with a proposal. But when Verbena discovers that a mysterious and celebrated poet by the name of Flora Witcombe has been publishing verses that hint she is onto their scheme, Verbena has no choice but to pretend to be a poet herself to confront her in a local salon. And --- unexpectedly --- be charmed by her. Flora, in turn, is terrified by and smitten with Verbena in equal measure. Faced with two suitors and a fiancé, Verbena, who has always had to be clever to survive in society, starts to realize she may need to think outside of society’s constraints to find true happiness.

Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He’d return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars “couldn’t keep their eyes off...your father.” Lou could be cruel to Fran, his wife of 59 years, but he loved his youngest son. Tom was a nervous boy, devoted to his mother, but Lou sought to turn him into a version of himself. He showered him with advice about how to dress, how to be an alpha male, and especially, how to attract and bed women. Tom wrestled with Lou’s imposing presence all his life. When one of Lou’s mistresses stood up at his funeral and announced, “Can we all...just agree...that this...was a man,” Tom set off to learn the facts of his father’s life. The secrets he uncovered staggered Tom, but in the process allowed him, at last, to become his own man, by his own lights.

Jules has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, but she still works with him at Gunk, the grotty student nightclub he owns in central Brighton. She spends her nights serving shots and watching, from behind the bar, as Leon flirts with students on the dancefloor. In the early hours of the morning, she trudges home to sleep alone. But then Leon hires 18-year-old Nim to work at the bar and Jules finds herself jolted awake. When Nim discovers she’s pregnant, Jules agrees to help. As the months pass, and the relationship between the two women grows increasingly intimate and perplexing, it emerges that Nim has her own unexpected gifts to give. Now, alone in her small flat, Jules is holding a baby, just 24 hours old, who still smells of Nim. But no one knows where Nim is, or if she's coming back. What could the future possibly look like?

Beginning in the hours after Anne Boleyn’s beheading, when she wakes to find herself unceremoniously laid to rest in a makeshift coffin, her head wrapped in linen at her knees. Discarded by King Henry VIII for being unable to give him a male heir and reviled by Cromwell for being too smart for her own good, she was ultimately executed based on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest, and high treason. Anne escapes the Tower of London, sews her head back on, then sets out on a quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry her own lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour. The stakes are high --- if Jane gives birth to a rival heir, Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, will lose her claim to the throne. Traveling the streets of London with the help of a prostitute who becomes a trusted friend (and perhaps something more), Anne soon realizes how little she knew about life in the real world.

In late 1960s Appalachia, many things loom darkly over June Branham: the Vietnam War is dividing the country, and a strip mine is eating away the mountain at the head of the holler where she lives. While still in high school, June has fallen in love. She is pregnant, and the father may be Ellis Akers. Ellis is the son of Solomon, a mortal enemy of June’s stepfather, Isom. The feud is so old it fuels two vengeful men with the power of long animosity between rival families. June’s brother, Tom, leaves to enlist in the war, and so does Ellis. Suddenly, June is on her own, at sixteen with a newborn, and is a mother unable to protect her daughter from the wrath of Isom. Without warning, her baby is kidnapped. Guided by her love for the generations of women before her, but now desperately alone, June must carefully navigate the search for her child alongside family and strangers in a wild and disappearing landscape.

Daniel Kraus first saw George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since, Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. He couldn't help but wonder: Are there other admirers of the film out there who feel the same? PARTIALLY DEVOURED uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film's importance and to examine the author's early life of rural isolation and local violence.

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack --- a former playwright mourning his failed career --- catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now. Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage.

Michael A lives a quiet, comfortable life since his retirement from the intelligence services. Practically a recluse, he spends his days imagining the lives of the anonymous people he watches in the park beneath the window of his elegant New York townhouse --- number 221 --- his every need tended to by his housekeeper, Mrs. Baker. For weeks, a girl has sat in the park every morning at dawn. Always alone. Always watchful. And when the sun rises, she vanishes, as if she was never there. But one day her routine changes --- and Michael realizes that she faces terrible danger. He makes an uncharacteristic decision to abandon his solitude and help her. Soon, Michael finds himself plunged into the New York underworld, and he’ll have to use all the tricks of his former trade if he’s to keep not just himself, but his new friend, alive.