Alice Bliss

Originally a short, one-woman musical called Alice Unwrapped, this tender-hearted novel uses its larger canvas to delve more deeply into the plight of adolescent Alice, struggling to be strong for her mother and her younger sister after her father is deployed to Iraq. Laura Harrington poignantly captures the conflicting emotions of those left at home during wartime.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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