From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like "The Walking Dead" have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls and bestseller lists, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial and deeply profound. In AMERICAN COMICS, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history. His story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell.

When he debuted as the host of "Jeopardy!" in 1984, Alex Trebek became something like a family member to millions of television viewers, bringing entertainment and education into their homes five nights a week. In 2019, he made the stunning announcement that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. What followed was an incredible outpouring of love and kindness. For more than three decades, Trebek had resisted countless appeals to write a book about his life. Yet he was moved so much by all the goodwill, he felt compelled to finally share his story. THE ANSWER IS... combines illuminating personal anecdotes with Trebek’s thoughts on a range of topics, including marriage, parenthood, education, success, spirituality and philanthropy.

Much of BAGGAGE chronicles my life in Hollywood and how, since I recovered from a nervous breakdown at 28, work has repeatedly whisked me away from personal calamities to sets and stages around the world. It is also about marriage(s): starting with the break-up of my first (to a woman) and ending with the ascension to my second (to a man) with many kissed toads in between! But in everything, each failed relationship or encounter with a legend (Liza! X-Men! Gore Vidal! Kubrick! Spice Girls!), in every bad decision or moment of sensual joy I have endeavored to show what I have learned and how I’ve become who I am today: a happy, flawed, vulnerable, fearless middle-aged man, with a lot of baggage.

For over 300 years, a curse has kept the Owens family from love --- but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger --- the curse is already at work. A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother.

Shelby Springfield has spent the last 10 years trying to overcome her past, sanding it away like the rough spots on the vintage furniture she makes over. But as a former child star, it’s hard to forget a widely documented meltdown and huge public breakup with her former co-star, Lyle Jessup. It’s also hard to forget her other co-star and childhood sweetheart, Cameron Riggs, the one who got away. Anytime Shelby has called, Cameron has come running. Then he runs right off again to chase stories around the world by making documentaries, too scared to admit what he really wants. But when Lyle stirs the pot, getting the two back in the spotlight with a home renovation show, Cameron can't help but get on board. There's something in it for everyone --- almost.

The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions --- Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague --- until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. EMPIRE OF PAIN is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world. It chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

Kathy Begley is an empty nester, the primary caretaker of her ailing mother, and the emotional support for her laid-off husband. She’s also returning to the office after two decades to work under a borderline inappropriate boss. Then a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony invitation arrives, and she uncovers an unfathomable family secret: her mother, Peggy Mayfield, was a Women Airforce Service Pilot. Peggy jumped at the opportunity to become a WASP, the first American female to fly military aircraft. Once a spunky flyer, Peggy is now filled with regret as she confronts the end of her life, but Kathy is determined to make her last months count by securing Peggy long-overdue recognition and forgiving her before it’s too late.

Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station --- without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once. She owes him. After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record. Now he’s gone. When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he’s become.

Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly. Long ago, she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena --- a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man --- Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment.

Bernie is in the holiday spirit and refers a potential client to Victor Klovsky, a fellow private eye. But when Victor doesn’t show up at his mom’s to light the Hanukkah candles, she hires Chet and Bernie to find him. They soon discover that Victor’s client has also vanished. The trail leads to the ruins of a mission called Nuestra Señora de los Saguaros, dating back to the earliest Spanish explorers. Some very dangerous people are interested in the old mission. Does some dusty archive hold the secret of a previously unknown art treasure, possibly buried for centuries? What does the Flight into Egypt --- when Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus fled Herod --- have to do with saguaros, the Sonoran desert cactus?

Mia and Finn are busy turning a derelict house into their dream home when Mia unexpectedly falls pregnant. But just when they think the house is ready, Mia discovers a chilling message scored into a skirting board: I WILL SAVE THEM FROM THE ATTIC. Following the clue up into the eaves, the couple make a gruesome discovery: their dream home was once a house of horrors. Mia can’t shake her fixation with the monstrous crimes that happened right above them. Haunted by the terrible things she saw and desperate to find answers, her obsession pulls her ever further from her husband. Secrecy shrouds the mystery of the attic, but when shards of a dark truth start to emerge, Mia realizes the danger is terrifyingly present.

Lurking beneath the progressive activism and sex positivity in the 1970-80s, a dark undercurrent of violence rippled across the American landscape. This led the FBI to create a specialized team --- the “Mindhunters,” better known as the Behavioral Science Unit --- that would track down the country's most dangerous criminals. And yet narrowing down a seemingly infinite list of potential suspects seemed daunting at best and impossible at worst --- until Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess stepped on the scene. In A KILLER BY DESIGN, Burgess reveals how her pioneering research on sexual assault and trauma caught the attention of the FBI, and steered her right into the middle of a chilling serial murder investigation in Nebraska.

Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England. Upon arrival, they meet the festival’s other guests --- an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic and a war historian --- along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line. When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

Robin Blyth is the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known. Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it --- not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles --- and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.

In the shadow of Mount Hood, 16-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister, Sophie, when the girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams. From out of nowhere, their father sweeps them up and drops them through a trapdoor into a storm cellar. But the sound only gets worse.

Rebecca Solnit’s new book is a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions --- from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

The former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back --- a loud-mouth frog.

On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants. Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view. As each character’s journey unfurls and overlaps, deceit and misunderstandings fueled by obsession and prejudice are revealed, forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe.

South Korea, 1970s: Sergeant First Class Cecil B. Harvey has long been a friend (willing or unwilling) to Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. So when he goes missing with a top-secret document that even a glance at could get an officer court-martialed, Sueño and Bascom take it upon themselves to find him. Meanwhile, Overseas Observer reporter Katie Byrd Worthington is back to make life difficult for top Army brass. When she lands in a Korean jail cell, Sueño and Bascom are sent to get her out --- and negotiate against the publication of an incriminating story about the mistreatment of women in the military that could land important officials in hot water. But what they learn will make it hard for them to stay silent.

The supernatural, the surreal and the all-too real. Such tales of the dark and the unknown have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows. The latest volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror edited by fantasy aficionado Paula Guran offers more than 400 pages of tales from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique, including Alix E. Harrow, Zen Cho and Elizabeth Hand. Indulge if you dare, because these 23 tales of terror are sure to delight as well as disturb!