Tod Goldberg is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen novels, including the Gangsterland quartet: Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize; Gangster Nation; The Low Desert, a…
World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award–winning author and poet Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States…
Season’s Readings everyone! As is generally true, there have been some marvelous books published in 2025, and I’m thrilled to share my favorites with you. I’ve listed these books in alphabetical order…
Travis Baldree is a full-time audiobook narrator who has lent his voice to hundreds of stories. Before that, he spent decades designing and building video games like Torchlight, Rebel Galaxy, and Fate…
D.J. Waldie is a historian of Los Angeles, a memoirist, and a translator. He is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1995), Where Are We Now: Notes from Los Angeles (2005), Becoming Los Angeles…
Eric Heisserer is the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of Arrival and the creator of the Netflix series Shadow and Bone. He lives in Los Angeles. His debut novel is Simultaneous and he recently…
Deston Munden is the author of several books, including Tavern, also set in Dargath. Born and raised near the Outer Banks, he can be found writing, cooking, playing World of Warcraft, and cosplaying…
Richard Wolinsky co-hosted and produced Probabilities, a half-hour radio program devoted to science fiction, mystery, and mainstream fiction, from 1977 to 1995 on KPFA-FM. He took the program solo in…
Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Duke Univ. Press, 2015). Oliver is a…
Jennifer O'Callaghan is a freelance writer and journalist. She has worked as a reporter for Metro News, The Sundance Channel, Shaw TV, and CKUA radio in news, entertainment, and lifestyle beats. She…
Joan believes herself to be a typical teenager. She spends her summers in London visiting her maternal grandmother, while her father visits his family in Malaysia. During this visit, she has been volunteering at Holland House, a historic home and museum in Kensington. Holland House is where she met Nick...
In 2019, Kim Michele Richardson told the story of Cussy Mary Carter and her work as a Pack Horse Librarian in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Now, in 2022, Richardson returns to tell the next chapter in Cussy Mary’s story, which actually belongs to her daughter, in The Book...
A young woman on her way to her first day of classes at Brooklyn College spills coffee on herself just prior to boarding the subway. Another young woman on the train comes to her rescue with a scarf and a kind word. The next time the student boards the train...
Vodou priestess Mambo Reina Dumond learned the practices and customs of Vodou as a child from her father, while her family was living in Haiti. She is inhabited by the spirit of Erzulie, which makes her a gifted practitioner of water magic. Reina operates a small business behind her home...
The year is 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. is about to hold his Freedom Rally at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles; William H. Parker is Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department; John F. Kennedy is President of the United States; Pat Brown is the Governor of California; Gas is...
Meiko is the Japanese wife of Jamie Briggs, a white US Air Force pilot fighting in World War II. Meiko, and her daughter Aiko, are “residents” of the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. A few days ago, an unscheduled truck came to the camp. The residents are told to stay...
Mickey Barnes NEEDS to get off Midgard, the colony planet on which he has lived his entire life. Because staying on Midgard is not an option, he takes the only avenue open to him: he volunteers to be the “expendable” on Midgard’s first outgoing colony ship, the Drakkar. An “expendable”...
In 1975, the comic book industry is struggling. It has survived, mostly, Frederic Wertham’s criticisms and claims regarding a causal relationship between reading comics and becoming a juvenile delinquent in Seduction of the Innocent. But there have been casualties. Readership is down. Publishers are closing. Writers and artists are left...
N.K. Jemisin is a multiple award-winning, speculative fiction writer. Currently, she resides in Brooklyn, New York and, as evidenced by her novel, The City We Became, she LOVES the “Big Apple”.Every century or so, a city will “manifest”, it becomes a living thing, an entity of its own. This has...
Redwood Phipps is an African-American girl. Aidan Wildfire Cooper is a Seminole Irish young man. The two are brought together by a hateful act of racial violence, which affects both of them for the remainder of their lives. But both are determined to keep the event from defining them. In...
