Two friends must uncover the truth about the bloody reappearance of a cryptid in this queer, X-Files-inspired thriller from the author of Bad Creek. To save her family’s struggling ranch, 18-year-old Claire fabricates a video of her hometown’s legendary alien cryptid, Old Lucky, that grabs the attention of paranormal vloggers Lenny and Evan. Lenny is plagued with doubts about their channel’s future, so catching Old Lucky might just be her chance at finding something real. After Evan deserts Lenny, believing the investigation to be a hoax, Claire agrees to “help” Lenny uncover the history of Old Lucky—and preserve her deceit. But the more the girls are drawn together and the more clues they unearth, the more secrets rise to the surface. The cows are being mutilated, the ranch hand has disappeared, and the strange lights in the sky are back. Something inhuman lurks in Scarberry, where danger lives close to home. The Monsters We Made is an eerie and suspenseful exploration of one town’s dark history and the people who brought it back to life.

The Demon Overlord retires to farm turnips in peace, only to find life in a small village far more chaotic than he ever could have anticipated in this laugh-out-loud debut cozy fantasy with teeth. When destroying the world and killing the hero grows boring, what’s a Demon Overlord to do but quit while he’s ahead? Galornus Prime was the Scourge of Nations, Ender of Hope, and Master of the Cardinal Sins. He had done everything worth doing. Some of it more than once. His retirement plan was simple: get a goat, farm quietly, and avoid accidentally conquering anything. The plan didn’t include soul-crushing town halls, after-school combat lessons with children, and a war with perhaps his most worthy nemesis yet: the rose-growing, seventy-three year-old widow next door. Even in retirement, evil never sleeps…but it does plant turnips. When corrupt officials and greedy merchants threaten his infuriatingly loveable neighbors, Galornus faces a new kind of challenge: saving the village without revealing he is the monster parents invoke to make children eat their vegetables. The Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan is a cozy fantasy with teeth, where the hardest battle isn’t defeating heroes—it’s staying retired and learning how to live after 444 lifetimes of villainy.

Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her. Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic. When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. And the highwayman? He just so happens to be the King’s nephew, Captain of the most dangerous men in Blunder…and guilty of high treason. Together they must gather twelve Providence Cards—the keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.

A time-traveling salesman searches for the moments that truly matter in this poignant short story from nationally bestselling author Peng Shepherd. Russ commutes to work—not across town but through time. An ambitious employee stuck in Oracle Marketing Solutions’ mundane “near past” division, he longs for the excitement of ancient eras and distant futures. But Oracle’s secretive management has refused every one of his transfer requests, and Russ can’t understand why…until he makes a devastating discovery about his own timeline. Peng Shepherd’s For a Limited Time Only is part of The Time Traveler’s Passport, an unforgettable collection of stories about memory, identity, and choice. Watch time fly as you read or listen to each short story in a single sitting.

The small town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is an unlikely location for a Playboy Resort, and nineteen-year old Sherri Taylor is an unlikely bunny. Growing up in neighboring East Troy, Sherri plays the organ at the local church and has never felt comfortable in her own skin. But when her parents die in quick succession, she leaves the only home she’s ever known for the chance to be part of a glamorous slice of history. In the winter of 1981, in a costume two sizes too small, her toes pinched by towering stilettos, Sherri joins the daughters of dairy farmers and factory workers for the defining experience of her life. Living in the “bunny hutch”—Playboy’s version of a college dorm, surrounded by a twelve-foot high barbed-wire fence (to keep the men out, and the girls in)—Sherri gets her education in the joys of sisterhood, the thrill of financial independence, the magic of first love, and the heady effects of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But as spring gives way to summer, Sherri finds herself caught up in a romantic triangle––and the tragedy that ensues will haunt her for the next forty years of her life. Shoulder Season follows Sherri from her fledgling days as a bunny, when she tries to reinvent herself before she even knows who she is, to the woman she becomes years later. From the Midwestern prairie to the California desert, from Wisconsin lakes to the Pacific Ocean, this is a story of what happens when small town life is sprinkled with stardust, and what we lose—and gain—when we leave home. It’s about the brief but intoxicating experiences of our youth, and how they have the power to shape the rest of our lives. With a heroine to root for and a narrative to get lost in, Shoulder Season is a sexy, evocative tale, drenched in longing and desire, that captures a fleeting moment in American history with nostalgia and heart.

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequencesWhat happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

Beach Read meets The Flatshare in this warmly funny and delightfully sharp debut rom-com about a down-on-her-luck young woman who turns an innocent mix-up between a dating app and a roommate app into a new chance at love. After getting passed over for an overdue—and much needed—promotion, Sadie Green is in desperate need of three things: a stiff drink, a new place to live, and a one-night-stand. When one drink turns into one too many, Sadie mixes up a long-ignored dating app for a roommate-finding app and finds herself on the doorstep of Jack Thomas’s gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone. Too bad she’s more attracted to his impressive real estate than she is to the man himself. Jack, still grieving the unexpected death of his parents, has learned to find comfort in video games and movie marathons instead of friends. So while he doesn’t know just what to make of the vivaciously verbose Sadie, he’s willing to offer her his spare bedroom while she gets back on her feet. And with the rent unbeatably low, Sadie can finally pursue her floristry side hustle full-time. The two are polar opposites, but as Sadie’s presence begins to turn the brownstone into a home, they both start to realize they may have just made the deal of a lifetime.

A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series. Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk. So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her. But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever-encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded town. And that rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior hockey team is about to compete in the national championships, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of the town now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys. A victory would send star player Kevin onto a brilliant professional future in the NHL. It would mean everything to Amat, a scrawny fifteen-year-old treated like an outcast everywhere but on the ice. And it would justify the choice that Peter, the team's general manager, and his wife, Kira, made to return to his hometown and raise their children in this beautiful but isolated place. Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semifinal match is the catalyst for a violent act that leaves a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Hers is a story no one wants to believe since the truth would mean the end of the dream. Accusations are made, and like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Welcome to the Gun Show! The top ten list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face. The Iron Tangle. An impossibly-complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations are less than safe, and the exit is always just a few stops away. But there is hope. For the first time, the crawlers are all working together. The loot is better than ever. And the secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly-useless book. Welcome, crawlers. Welcome to the fourth floor of the dungeon.

SCRABBLE may be truly called America's game. But for every group of "living-room players" there is someone who is "at one with the board." In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis introduces readers to those few, exploring the underground world of colorful characters for which the Scrabble game is life — playing competitively in tournaments across the country. It is also the story of how the Scrabble game was invented by an unemployed architect during the Great Depression and how it has grown into the hugely successful, challenging, and beloved game it is today. Along the way, Fatsis chronicles his own obsession with the game and his development as a player from novice to expert. More than a book about hardcore Scrabble players, Word Freak is also an examination of notions of brilliance, memory, language, competition, and the mind that celebrates the uncanny creative powers in us all.

A fun, smart and surprising dive into the past, present and future of accents – and the enduring power of sounding differentAccents have long held our fascination; As far back as the 7th Century BCE, Egyptian pharaohs experimented with babies to test out theories about the “original” accent and the Old Testament relays how a small difference in the pronunciation of “s” became a fatal litmus test of tribal belonging. Still today, from dinner parties to job interviews, you’ll find people kicking up dust about things like where and how to pronounce a ‘t,’ as in, never in “often,” but with proper British poshness, as in “t(y)une.”  In Why We Talk Funny, linguist Valerie Fridland unlocks the secrets of what linguistic science, psychology and history can tell us about the evolution of human speech, why accents develop, and how they shape our professional and social lives. With a healthy dose of her signature humor and captivating anecdotes, Fridland explores how the twin forces of physiology and psychology along with the need to fit in changes the trajectory of speech over languages and lifetimes,diving deep into the history and social forces driving the way people talk. Along the way, she emphasizes that accents don’t always set us apart, they can also bring us together.  Whether it's the accent that hints at your hometown, your group, your social status or your ethnicity, the sounds we say reveal a lot about who we are and where we’ve been – even for those who might think they have no accent at all.The story of language is the story of humanity, and as Fridland reminds us, the funny sounds we make – whether from the mouths of ancient ancestors or the tongues of screenbound teens – all come from the same powerful desire to communicate and belong. Why We Talk Funny will change the way you think about your own accent – and transform the way you listen to the sounds of others.