Anna Godbersen is the author of the New York Times bestselling series The Luxe, among other novels for young adults and older adults.
Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through more than a few pages of The Catcher in the Rye,which has resulted in some sheepish sidestepping when I am asked to speak in my capacity as an author of young adult fiction. Admittedly this came up more frequently in the years
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2026
That year, I asked only one question and spent a lot of time looking out my apartment’s kitchen window. The view was mostly a three-story ailanthus, its leaves orange and lavender at the end of the day. The phone rang. It was my mother. That year, I didn’t like talking
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JULY/AUGUST 2022
Illustration by Mayra Tuncel. Afterward, Lila felt washed clean. Her face was as bare of makeup as a child’s and her insides had a drained, weightless quality, as though wrung of excess moisture. The hospital bed was stacked with so many pillows, pads, and blankets, it was as though she
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 4
FALL 2022
FLATIRON, APRIL 2023, 304 PP. HALFWAY THROUGH MONICA Brashears’s debut House of Cotton, the narrator, Magnolia, observes, “Grief makes people slapstick.” Until then, I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of novel I was reading. The story is told by a young woman who takes a very strange job in a
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023
KNOPF, JUNE 2022, 240 PP. WHAT SORT OF novel is Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl? This is not an easily answered question, and I suspect it may depend somewhat on the mood of the reader. A book with girl in the title signals a page-turner, and Hurricane Girl does compel us
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 3
JULY/AUGUST 2022