Blackgirl on Mars is a radical memoir that chronicles author, educator and activist Lesley-Ann Brown's two years' worth of travel searching for "home". As she travels across the US during the Black Lives Matter protests and Covid-19 pandemic and then to Trinidad and Tobago to attend the funeral of her grandmother, Brown tells her own life-story, as well as writing about race, gender, sexuality, and education, and ideas of home, family and healing. Both a radical political manifesto and a moving memoir about finding your place in the world, Blackgirl on Mars is about what it means to be a Black and Indigenous woman in Europe and the Americas in the twenty-first century.

A Trinidadian-American writer and activist explores motherhood, migration, and identity—and how it relates to land, imprisonment, and genocide for Black and Indigenous peoples. Having moved to Copenhagen, Denmark from Brooklyn over 18 years ago, Brown attempts to contextualize her and her son’s existence in a post-colonial and supposedly post-racial world, where the very machine of so-called progress has been premised upon the demise of her lineage. Through letters to her son, Brown writes the past into the present—penned from the country that has been declared “The Happiest Place in the World”—creating a vision that is a necessary alternative to the dystopian one currently being bought and sold.

Miriam is fifteen and she has lived in the same little town her whole life, going to school with the same kids who know everything about her. But now she's in high school and wishing she lived in a big city where she could meet new people and see new things. In other words, like fifteen-year-olds everywhere, Miriam is desperately waiting for her life to start happening. Something, anything -- a first love, perhaps. And then love comes, in a completely unexpected way, when Miriam meets a new classmate, Laura. Suddenly, life is very complicated and unsettling, as Miriam finds herself lying to her girlfriends, avoiding her brother's probing questions, and second guessing every move she makes. Then Philip, Miriam and Laura take a weekend trip to the big city -- a trip that makes everything clear, and more confusing than ever.

A Newbery Medal winning modern classic about a racially divided small town and a boy who runs. Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee might have lived a normal life if a freak accident hadn't made him an orphan. After living with his unhappy and uptight aunt and uncle for eight years, he decides to run--and not just run away, but run. This is where the myth of Maniac Magee begins, as he changes the lives of a racially divided small town with his amazing and legendary feats.

Grimly Eric John Stark slogged toward that ancient Martian city—with every step he cursed the talisman of Ban Cruach that flamed in his blood-stained belt. Behind him screamed the hordes of Ciaran, hungering for that magic jewel—ahead lay the dread abode of the Ice Creatures—at his side stalked the whispering spectre of Ban Cruach, urging him on to a battle Stark knew he must lose!

Explores the bonds of family, neighbors, lovers, and friends as they are tested in new environments. "I feel like I can't tell one story about a giant mustard penis because it's not about a mustard penis only, but about all of these incidents together, in context, and through time." So begins the title story in Renee Simms's debut short story collection, Meet Behind Mars—a revealing look at how geography, memory, ancestry, and desire influence our personal relationships. In many of her stories, Simms exposes her own interest in issues concerning time and space. For example, in "Rebel Airplanes," an L.A. engineer works by day on city sewers and by night on R-C planes that she yearns to launch into the cosmos. The character-driven stories in Meet Behind Mars offer beautiful insight into the emotional lives of caretakers, auto workers, dancers, and pawn shop employees. In "High Country," a frustrated would-be novelist considers ditching her family in the middle of the desert. In "Dive," an adoptee returns to her adoptive home, still haunted by histories she does not know. Simms writes from the voice of women and girls who struggle under structural oppression and draws from the storytelling tradition best represented by writers like Edward P. Jones, whose characters have experiences that are specific to black Americans living in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One instance of this is in "The Art of Heroine Worship," in which black families integrate into a white suburb of Detroit in the 1970s. The stories in this collection span forty years and two continents and range in structure from epistolary to traditionally structured realism, with touches of absurdity, humor, and magic. Meet Behind Mars will appeal to readers interested in contemporary literary fiction.

An introvert braves the cybersex, the pitfalls of eating out alone, the difficulties of weight gain, and other hurdles faced by shy people living in a world that urges us to be cool as "J" humorously recounts her life in all its awkward glory.