In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, Elisabeth Bailey shares an inspiring and intimate story of her uncommon encounter with a Neohelix albolabris —a common woodland snail. While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence on her nightstand. As a result, she discovers the solace and sense of wonder that this mysterious creature brings and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world. Intrigued by the snail’s molluscan anatomy, cryptic defenses, clear decision making, hydraulic locomotion, and mysterious courtship activities, Bailey becomes an astute and amused observer, providing a candid and engaging look into the curious life of this underappreciated small animal.  Told with wit and grace, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world illuminates our own human existence and provides an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

An orphanage for girls is actually a boot camp, turning out magical child soldiers for a gruesome war. Yet love finds a way to blossom amid bloodshed, in this dramatic, much-anticipated yuri manga that is spiritual kin to the likes of Revolutionary Girl Utena, Otherside Picnic, and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. Vulnerable and Exploited Death lurks behind a mysterious orphanage where children train to become magical weapons of war. Among them is Sheena, who longs to stop the fighting and end the conflict. On one gruesome night, Sheena meets a strange girl covered in blood, with a smile on her face. The mysterious girl turns out to be a secret weapon—an immortal child soldier named Mimi. When the two become roommates, there is growing tension and attraction. How will the peace-loving Sheena live with someone who welcomes death? Love blossoms amid bloodshed in a new enthralling yuri dystopian manga.

In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow south must figure out how to save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.

LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST ANTHOLOGYSixteen short stories from China's groundbreaking science fiction writers, edited and translated by award-winning author Ken Liu.In Hugo award-winner Liu Cixin's ‘Moonlight,’ a man is contacted by three future versions of himself, each trying to save their world from destruction. Hao Jingfang’s ‘The New Year Train’ sees 1,500 passengers go missing on a train that vanishes into space. In the title story by Tang Fei, a young girl is shown how the stars can reveal the future.In addition, three essays explore the history and rise of Chinese science fiction publishing, contemporary Chinese fandom, and how the growing interest in Chinese SF has impacted writers who had long laboured in obscurity.By turns dazzling, melancholy and thought-provoking, Broken Stars celebrates the vibrancy and diversity of SFF voices emerging from China.Stories include:“Goodnight, Melancholy” by Xia Jia “The Snow of Jinyang” by Zhang Ran “Broken Stars” by Tang Fei “Submarines” by Han Song “Salinger and the Koreans” by Han Song “Under a Dangling Sky” by Cheng Jingbo “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear” by Baoshu“The New Year Train” by Hao Jingfang “The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales” by Fei Dao “Moonlight” by Liu Cixin “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge" by Anna Wu “The First Emperor’s Games” by Ma Boyong “Reflection” by Gu Shi“The Brain Box” by Regina Kanyu Wang“Coming of the Light” by Chen Qiufan “A History of Future Illnesses” by Chen Qiufan Essays:“A Brief Introduction to Chinese Science Fiction and Fandom,” by Regina Kanyu Wang, “A New Continent for China Scholars: Chinese Science Fiction Studies” by Mingwei Song“Science Fiction: Embarrassing No More” by Fei DaoFor more Chinese SF in translation, check out Invisible Planets.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast: A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality—and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity. Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong. The notion that everyone wants sex—and that we all have to have it—is false. It's intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that's not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity. In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. Brown advocates for the "A" in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer—despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise. With chapters on desire, f*ckability, utility, refusal, and possibilities, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality discusses topics of deep relevance to ace and a-spec communities. It centers the Black asexual experience—and demands visibility in a world that pathologizes and denies asexuality, denigrates queerness, and specifically sexualizes Black people. A necessary and unapologetic reclamation, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is smart, timely, and an essential read for asexuals, aromantics, queer readers, and anyone looking to better understand sexual politics in America.

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple crises, Afro–Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities. Making Livable Worlds weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an “ethnographer of home” as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.

In a city so dismal it's known only as "the Hole," a clan of Sorcerers have been plucking people off the streets to use as guinea pigs for atrocious "experiments" in the black arts. In a dark alley, Nikaido found Caiman, a man with a reptile head and a bad case of amnesia. To undo the spell, they're hunting and killing the Sorcerers in the Hole, hoping that eventually they'll kill the right one. But when En, the head Sorcerer, gets word of a lizard-man slaughtering his people, he sends a crew of "cleaners" into the Hole, igniting a war between two worlds.

As fiercely feminist as it is hopeful, this speculative, sapphic YA romance is simultaneously a modern-day war cry and a PSA that there is a wolf who slumbers us all—we only have to wake her. Rue’s life is over. After she’s caught kissing a girl behind the Sunday School classrooms, she gets exiled to Sacred Heart so she can be transformed into her mother’s idea of a respectable lady. The irony of being sent to—of all places—an all-girls Catholic boarding school is not lost on Rue, especially when she falls immediately and irreversibly under the spell of its ethereal, ferocious outcast, Charlotte Savage.  But there’s more to Charlotte than her sharp gaze and even sharper Charlotte Savage is, against all logic, a werewolf. And Rue can become one, too—any woman can, if she’s brave enough to heed the wild that howls inside of her. She and Charlotte aren’t alone in answering the call, and upon forming a wolf pack of wild girls who refuse to remain docile, Rue realizes she couldn’t have been more wrong. Her life isn’t over. It’s just beginning. This world is not kind to women, much less wild women…but God help the man who tries to cage the girls of Sacred Heart.

This wildly entertaining YA historical romance follows a young Black woman in 1860s England who yearns for a writing career and independence rather than love and marriage, but an unexpected inheritance forces her into London society and reunites her with the boy who broke her heart. Perfect for fans of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue and The Davenports. Eighteen-year-old Stella Sedgwick is a lost cause. While 1860s England offers little opportunity beyond marriage for a sharp-tongued, dark-skinned girl, Stella dreams of a writing career and independence. When her late mother’s former employer—the wealthy Thomas Fitzroy—summons Stella to London, he bequeaths her one of the family’s great estates on his deathbed. But such an inheritance will precipitate a legal battle, one that would be much easier if Stella were married. Suddenly thrust into lily-white London society with the goal of finding a husband, Stella also reunites with the Fitzroy heir Nathaniel, her childhood best friend, now somewhat of a stranger. But London presents other opportunities, like picking up her mother’s old advice column, where “Fiona Flippant” anonymously guided readers through upper-class perils. It turns out the dresses and balls aren’t so bad, though the stares and insults sometimes feel impossible to navigate. Things only grow more complicated with the attention of handsome suitors and Stella’s increasingly tempestuous relationship with Nathaniel. As new opportunities arise and old secrets are uncovered, Stella must decide when to play by the rules, when to break them, and when to let herself follow her heart.

Pride & Prejudice meets Crave when Austen-loving Lorena Navarro attends a new boarding school expecting to find her own Mr. Darcy, but accidentally finds the world’s last vampire instead!Pride comes before the fall.When a boarding school opens in a once-condemned Victorian manor buried in the woods of New Hampshire, Austen-loving Lorena Navarro enrolls in hopes of finding her own Mr. Darcy. Instead, she stumbles across a coffin and accidentally awakens the world’s last vampire.After hibernating for nearly three centuries, William Pride is desperate to find his family—and clueless about the modern world. Relying on Lorena for more than just blood, he enrolls at the school to catch up on all he’s missed.Soon, William uncovers a chilling He is the last hope for his kind’s return to power. Torn between protecting the humans around him and fulfilling his fate, William must make a choice that could change everything. Will he sacrifice his species for love . . . or will he embrace his dark destiny at last?

Faolan Kelly’s grandfather is dead. She’s alone in the world and suddenly homeless, all because the local powers that be don’t think a young man of sixteen is mature enough to take over his grandfather’s homestead…and that’s with them thinking Faolan is a young man. If she revealed that her grandfather had been disguising her for years, they would marry her off at the first opportunity. The mayor finds a solution that serves everyone but Faolan. He hires a gunslinger to ship her off to the Settlement, a remote fort where social outcasts live under the leadership of His Benevolence Gideon Dillard. It's a place rife with mystery, kept afloat by suspicious wealth. Dillard's absolute command over his staff just doesn't seem right. And neither do the strange noises that keep Faolan up at night. When Faolan finds the body of a Settlement boarder, mangled by something that can’t possibly be human, it’s clear something vicious is stalking the palisades. And as Settlement boarders continue to drop like flies, Faolan knows she must escape to evade the creature’s wrath.

Award-winning translator and author Ken Liu presents a collection of short speculative fiction from China. Some stories have won awards; some have been included in various 'Year's Best' anthologies; some have been well reviewed by critics and readers; and some are simply Ken's personal favorites. Many of the authors collected here (with the obvious exception of Liu Cixin) belong to the younger generation of 'rising stars'. In addition, three essays at the end of the book explore Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin's essay, The Worst of All Possible Universes and The Best of All Possible Earths, gives a historical overview of SF in China and situates his own rise to prominence as the premier Chinese author within that context. Chen Qiufan's The Torn Generation gives the view of a younger generation of authors trying to come to terms with the tumultuous transformations around them. Finally, Xia Jia, who holds the first Ph.D. issued for the study of Chinese SF, asks What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?.

Night of the Living Queers is a YA horror anthology that explores a night when anything is possible exclusively featuring queer authors of color putting fresh spins on classic horror tropes and tales. All Hallows’ Eve. Samhain. Dia De Los Muertos. Fiesta de Los Aguizotes. No matter its name or occasion, Halloween is more than a Hallmark holiday, it’s a symbol of transformation. NIGHT OF THE LIVING QUEERS is a YA horror anthology that explores how Halloween can be more than just candies and frights, but a night where anything is possible. Each short story will be told through the lens of a different BIPOC teen and the Halloween night that changes their lives forever. Creative, creepy, and queer, this collection will bring fresh terror, heart, and humor to young adult literature. Contributors include editors Alex Brown and Shelly Page, Kalynn Bayron, Ryan Douglass, Sara Farizan, Maya Gittelman, Kosoko Jackson, Em Liu, Vanessa Montalban, Ayida Shonibar, Tara Sim, Trang Thanh Tran, and Rebecca Kim Wells.