In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust. A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.

Diverse in theme as well as form, this new collection explodes onto the page with a maturity and dynamism rarely seen in such a young poet. Using language full of unique beauty and charisma, Miller writes everything from love poems to biblical chronicles, exploring themes such as conflicting identity, home and family, and the spirit of his Jamaican ancestors.

A maternal gothic tale of new motherhood and the torment of a centuries-old haunting.Before the shadow appeared, Sofia thought mothering would be all sun-drenched light and white linen sheets, as seen advertised by the momfluencers of Instagram. In her gorgeous home anchored in a posh suburb, far removed from her origins, Sofia revels in her success. Motherhood seems like the natural next step, but when her husband travels for a work trip, leaving Sofia all alone with their unnamed three-week-old baby, she can’t quite square how mothering falls solely in her lap. Nobody seems able or willing to help her: not her husband, not her best friend, and certainly not the zealot mother she cut off long ago. Her postpartum reality is overtaken by an ominous figure. Sleep-deprivation collides with a darkness that creeps in and begins to spread, threatening to consume her entirely. As her grip on reality slips away, Sofia learns of an insidious haunting that has plagued the eldest daughters in her family for generations. With her baby’s safety on the line, Sofia realizes she must confront her murky history or risk losing more than just the veneer of perfection.

From the editor of Yale's Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories , a smart and charming guide to the art of cartooning Winner of the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for the Best Academic/Scholarly Work  "Brunetti has given the cartooning world something very similar to what Strunk & White gave to prose with their Elements of Style.  . . . Keep it right next to your desk where you can find it at a moment’s notice."—Tim O’Neil, PopMatters.com The best cartooning is efficient visual storytelling—it is as much a matter of writing as it is of drawing. In this book, noted cartoonist and illustrator Ivan Brunetti presents fifteen distinct lessons on the art of cartooning, guiding his readers through wittily written passages on cartooning terminology, techniques, tools, and theory. Supplemented by Brunetti's own illustrations, prepared specially for this book, these lessons move the reader from spontaneous drawings to single-panel strips and complicated multipage stories. Through simple, creative exercises and assignments, Brunetti offers an unintimidating approach to a complex art form. He looks at the rhythms of storytelling, the challenges of character design, and the formal elements of comics while composing pages in his own iconic style and experimenting with a variety of tools, media, and approaches. By following the author's sophisticated and engaging perspective on the art of cartooning, aspiring cartoonists of all ages will hone their craft, create their personal style, and discover their own visual language.

What do we do when the world breaks our hearts? Racial capitalism in the age of pandemic continues to crush ever more lives and spirits. Yet, we are told repeatedly to master, to overcome, to be resilient. Beneath this fragile pretence of coping, many of us have grown used to living with profound and fathomless sorrow. In graceful prose, Gargi Bhattacharyya navigates collective grief and how it mingles with personal tragedy. Alongside love and joy, perhaps grief is what makes us human―and while its pain scrapes our wounds, its presence can help us renounce that which exists and build anew. Heartbreak is the class consciousness of our times. So, it is up to us, the heartbroken, to learn again to heal—and remake the world. Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in London. Their work includes writing on racism, racial capitalism, austerity and war.

"The black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work."—David Roediger, author of The Wages of WhitenessIn 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city. In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers. Written with clarity and grace, In the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience, as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.

In 1838, the Ibis, carrying a cargo of convicts and labourers, falls victim to a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. Among the survivors are Neel, a pampered raja charged with embezzlement; Paulette, a French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, a widowed poppy grower fleeing India with her lover. Also caught in the storm is Anahita, owned by the wealthy Parsi merchant Bahram Modi, which holds the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India. And the Redruth, which carries Frederick Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down China's rare and priceless plants. They will all converge in Canton, on the edge of China, as the Opium War begins to rage.

Craft an Engaging Plot How does plot influence story structure? What's the difference between plotting for commercial and literary fiction? How do you revise a plot or structure that's gone off course? With "Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure," you'll discover the answers to these questions and more. Award-winning author James Scott Bell offers clear, concise information that will help you create a believable and memorable plot, including: Techniques for crafting strong beginnings, middles, and endsEasy-to-understand plotting diagrams and chartsBrainstorming techniques for original plot ideasThought-provoking exercises at the end of each chapterStory structure models and methods for all genresTips and tools for correcting common plot problems Filled with plot examples from popular novels, comprehensive checklists, and practical hands-on guidance, "Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure" gives you the skills you need to approach plot and structure like an experienced pro.

A woman who's used to going solo discovers that there's one relationship she can't run away from in this buoyant novel from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The Summer We Got Free Twenty-six and broke, Skye didn't think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye moves through life entirely--and unrepentantly--on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Her personal life might be a mess, and no one would be surprised if she died alone in a hotel room, but at least she's free to do as she pleases. But then a twelve-year-old girl shows up during one of Skye's brief visits to her hometown of Philadelphia, and tells Skye that she's "her egg." Skye's life is thrown into sharp relief and she decides that it might be time to actually try to have a meaningful relationship with another human being. Spoiler alert: It's not easy. Things gets even more complicated when Skye realizes that the woman she tried and failed to pick up the other day is the girl's aunt and now it's awkward. All the while, her brother is trying to get in touch, her problematic mother is being bewilderingly kind, and the West Philly pool halls and hoagie shops of her youth have been replaced by hipster cafes. Told in a fresh, lively voice, this novel is a relentlessly clever, deeply moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.