Life is rarely what we want it to be, that is something we can know for a certainty. Sometimes it takes twists and turns that drag us into places that we never thought we would see. So it was for Dewey, James and their mother, Belinda. This is the story of a few people put to tests that made them doubt that there was ever any hope in their future. However, the funny thing about a future is that it has so many curves, mountains and valleys in it that we cannot truly see what really is there; and Hope can be a faraway place. We see, instead, sometimes what seems to be close up and hopeless. Can a simple photo of two people playing change lives? Why, for instance, does one of Dewey's grandfathers want to kill his mother, while the other only wants to ruin her life? Why does a Federal Judge intervene in a set of lives three thousand miles away? Why does the mere existence of Belinda, Dewey and James threaten the structure of a county government that they have left far behind?

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire

‘The Red Moment’ is the debut novel by Sydney Mercer. An adventure thriller, set in an inexplicable SciFi world where Knights fight Disco Masters and if you’re not careful someone may explode. Daisy Morales, having survived a childhood of torment, finds herself inflicted with the Red Moment: an overwhelming force that can only be subdued through murder. Wishing to protect the innocent from herself, Daisy joins the Threat Detection Agency and quickly finds herself facing off against the deadly and the bizarre until a threat larger than anything she can comprehend forces her to confront the darkness within and become one with the Red Moment… Or lose everyone she cares about.