Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world that centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-the-heel section of Hollywood: 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ’n’ rollers and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion. It also was the breaking and then the remaking --- and thus the true making --- of another great American writer: Eve Babitz. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.

A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous --- feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint.  And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free. Here, with MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, Sarah Moss takes on these rules, these lessons from the fables of girlhood, and uses them to fearlessly investigate the nature of memory, the lure of self-control, the impact of privilege, scarcity, parents and love.

Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love because of past injury. And then what happened was that she became a wild-pregnant-mammal-thing, and then she exploded herself by having a whole baby blast through her vagina. Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases --- Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby and Ongoing --- through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between raccoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches and more.

A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust. Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin. The end times are coming.

Tamar Glass fled an abusive mother when she was 18 to find a better life elsewhere. She has lived in freedom from Ruth for decades until one night she wakes to find her now-elderly mother standing over her bed, disoriented and confused. When Tamar reluctantly takes in her mother, strange events start happening inside her home. Tamar learns that Ruth has been kicked out of her assisted living home, and other facilities refuse to house her and endanger their own residents. Tamar has spent years suppressing her childhood trauma, but it comes rushing back with each strange event in her home. As Tamar copes with their disturbing past, which her mother stubbornly refuses to admit to, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something worse than her mother lurking in the shadows.

In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet --- a 70-year-old man who paints his visions --- lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael, and the Prophet feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past --- and perhaps change her future.

With one unexpected email from her estranged best friend, Lucy, Mina Murray’s carefully curated life is turned upside down. Leaving behind her psychiatric practice in London, she returns home to the windswept shores of Wales. Faced with everything she’s left behind, she soon discovers that Lucy’s symptoms mirror those of her mysterious amnesiac patient hundreds of miles away. With nothing but an untreatable sickness connecting the two women, and with Lucy’s life on the line, Mina finds herself asking questions and being drawn ever-deeper into a web of secrets, missing girls, and the powerful, nameless force at its center --- one that has been haunting her for years. As terrible, ancient truths begin to reveal themselves, Mina prepares to confront her own darkest secrets and, with them, an evil beyond comprehension.

In the grisly aftermath of a botched bank heist, career criminal Anne Heller has no choice but to return to her family’s cabin --- a secluded shack in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and the site of her mother’s untimely death. Along for the ride are Jessup, Anne’s badly wounded partner, and Dutch, the police officer she’s taken hostage. As they wait for help, Anne discovers strange relics from her mother’s past and begins to unfold the mystery of her childhood at the cabin. Then Jessup goes missing, only to turn up dead. Anne and Dutch bury her friend, but that night, he comes back and knocks at the cabin door. Not a dream, not a hallucination, but not exactly Jessup, either. Something else. Something wearing her friend’s face. Something hungry.

Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell. But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, "for the algorithm," in the upcoming season finale. Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles. Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future --- before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford --- a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows --- even if staying means being left behind.