Completely original, full of surprise, humor, grief, and wisdom and just the right amount of chickens.' Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ‘The coop houses no predators, but the chickens do not know this. A chicken knows only what it can see. A chicken’s life is full of magic. Lo and behold.’ Meet Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness, Miss Hennepin County, and their unlikely owner. Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails. From the freezing nights of a brutal winter to a sweltering summer which brings a surprise tornado, she battles predators, bad luck, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look anything like the one she always imagined. Brood by Jackie Polzin is a darkly funny, deeply moving and startling original debut novel of motherhood and grief, full of sorrow, joy and unrelenting hope. Perfect for fans of Jenny Offill and Elizabeth Strout.
When you're a hard-nosed, shoe leather reporter like Natalie Joday of Bergen County, NJ, murder investigations are just another day in the life. But when she discovers that her trouble-magnet brother Daniel was the last to see the late Lydia Dow alive, Natalie's enthusiasm for finding the truth turns to dread. But Natalie is determined to find Lydia's killer regardless, even if that means talking to the deceased's nearest and dearest—an eccentric cast of characters ranging from a chauvinistic, bullying father to an introverted sister to an overprotective boyfriend. But Lydia's will complicates the investigation, forcing Natalie to follow the considerable money trail... right back to her brother. Now she must choose between hiding the truth and protecting Daniel or risking everything to investigate long-buried secrets of the past—including her own.
In this gripping tale of passion, politics and conflict, King Henry II finds himself brutally betrayed by his wife Eleanor and three eldest sons when they enter into a rebellion against him. Aligning themselves with Henry's most bitter enemy, King Louis of France, their treacherous actions will have devastating consequences as they bring about the downfall of a brilliant man and a powerful empire. In Devil's Brood, the compelling story of Henry and Eleanor's once great love affair is explored in an uniquely vivid way. What twists of fate turn love to hatred? What points of principle and ambition cause these two icons to struggle for power, leaving their family tragically divided and their turbulent marriage finished in all but name? Sharon Penman's glorious trilogy reaches its spellbinding conclusion.
Two teenagers struggle with a horrific family legacy in the sequel to Chase Novak's novel, Breed. Thirteen years ago, a radical fertility doctor helped bring Adam and Alice Twisden into the world. The treatment came at a great cost: it turned the twins' parents into barbarous animals and threatens to transform the children, too. As Adam and Alice find themselves on the brink of maturity, they starve themselves in a desperate attempt to stop their bodies from changing. Will they succumb to the same bodily horrors that destroyed their parents? Their aunt, Cynthia, who has always wanted to be a mother, oversees renovations to the Twisden family's Upper East Side residence-violently torn apart by the children's parents -- and struggles to give her niece and nephew the unconditional love and stable home life they never had. Meanwhile, in the world outside, the forces of good and evil collide as a troop of wild teenagers, growing steadily in number, threatens to invade the calm refuge Cynthia is so determined to construct behind the safety of the Twisdens' walls. As New York City transforms into a battleground, Adam and Alice will have to decide where their loyalties lie. They are determined to lead normal lives -- and yet their unnatural urges, which grow ever stronger by the day, can only be stifled for so long...
Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas. PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA'S BROOD: "Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us." —Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America “Conventional exclamatory phrases don’t come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia’s Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, ‘It’s going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.’ Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we’ve been waiting for.” —Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier "Octavia once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side." —Steven Barnes, author of Lion’s Blood “Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake. Octavia's Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody.... Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars!” —Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy “Like [Octavia] Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom.” —dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of the poetry collectionScars/Stars and facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons. adrienne maree brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit, Michigan. She received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler–based writing workshops.
