Adult

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to white women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life.

It's been a year since Penny first walked through the doors of the Dallergut Dream Department Store. She is now an official employee of the dream industry! She can finally take the express commuter train to the Company District, where all the dream-production companies are located, and discover how all raw dream materials and testing equipment are produced. But the Company District is not quite what she expected. Instead it hides a secret underbelly of the magical industry that she thought she was a part of. Penny discovers the Civil Complaint Center, full of people filing complaints about their dreams. As she gets to the bottom of each complaint, she begins to expand her horizons, moving beyond the role of dreamseller to understanding what lies in the hearts of their lost regulars.

In 2012, Greece’s far-right political party the Golden Dawn were building a significant street presence in Greece. Over the previous decade, they had grown from a tiny group of neofascist brawlers to a formidable vigilante force responsible for multiple murders, street fights and shootings. On the eve of the 2012 election, one of their candidates said that the “knives will come out after the elections.” And the knives did come out. Golden Dawn became a significant parliamentary presence and used it as a platform to escalate their terror campaigns against migrants and leftists across the country. Journalist Patrick Strickland traces the antecedents of Golden Dawn to the dark years of Nazi occupation and subsequent military dictatorship, and looks at the post-2008 economic crisis that emboldened the far right.

Mrs. Blossom has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan. But when she finds a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot, everything changes. She is determined to see the world that she sometimes feels is passing her by. When Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS Solitaire, she did not expect to meet Allan on her transatlantic flight. He is the first man who has sparked something inside her since her beloved husband passed. She also didn’t expect Allan to be found dead 24 hours later in Paris, a city he wasn’t supposed to be in. Now Mrs. Blossom doesn’t know who to trust on board the ship, especially when a mystifying man, Danny, keeps popping up around every corner, always present when things go awry.

Between her high-demand job and taking care of her grandmother and her cats, Mia Crawford has little time for anything else. What time she does have, she pours into reading. Now, forced into taking a long-overdue vacation, she finds herself on a luxurious private island where she just might have a chance to reinvent herself --- for a little while, anyway. She can explore the island. Flirt shamelessly with a cute bartender. Have a vacation fling. Live like a heroine in one of her favorite novels. Or she can curl up with a good book on the beach. It turns out that reinventing yourself is easier planned than done. But when gossipy notes written in the margins of an old book turn out to be clues to the disappearance of another guest, Mia finds herself diving headfirst into a dangerous adventure.

When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her 11-year-old brother, Wolf, spend the summer at the town pool, where they acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community. That is, until a dramatic fallout on the very first day of her senior year tips the fickle balance of idyllic Riverburg and impacts everyone in her family.

A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.

Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over 25 years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet, and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband. What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives --- their 50th birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague --- all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.

Rei, Kiki and Ai are three sisters divided by distance and circumstance. Ambitious Rei works in finance in London; Kiki is the single mother of a young son, working in a retirement home in Tokyo; and Ai, the youngest, is a peripatetic Japanese music idol. Having lost both parents, one way or another, the sisters rely on each other as family, far-flung as they are. When Ai is embroiled in a scandal, Rei and Kiki pause their own lives to rescue their baby sister. Over the course of a summer spent in their childhood home on the Japanese coast, the sisters will reunite with their sharp-edged grandmother, care for Kiki’s irrepressible son, and silently worry about Ai, all while carefully not talking about the circumstances of their mother’s death 15 years before. But silence between sisters can only last for so long.

At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys Kinnick punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window, and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia? With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.