THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition), is indeed deluxe and handsome to look at!

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition)
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Pushkin Press Classics
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a classic collection of weird tales that has captivated readers since its original publication in 1895. The stories in this collection are linked by the mysterious play "The King in Yellow," a fictional drama that drives those who read it to madness and despair. Set against the backdrop of a beautifully detailed yet unsettling world, the stories explore themes of existential dread, the supernatural, and the fragility of the human mind.

This illustrated edition not only brings the haunting prose to life but also offers captivating illustrations that enhance the eerie atmosphere of Chambers' tales. Alongside the stories, readers will find a summary of the collection, a biography of the author, and a comprehensive list of characters, providing further insight into the dark and mysterious world of The King in Yellow.

Chambers' masterful storytelling and exploration of the unknown have earned this collection a place in the genre of weird fiction, influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. This edition is perfect for fans of Gothic horror, supernatural fiction, and anyone who enjoys a chilling tale that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Whether you're reading for the first time or revisiting these tales, this edition of The King in Yellow offers a deeper connection to the eerie and the unknown, complemented by stunning illustrations that capture the essence of Chambers' haunting world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of two halves, one being "The King in Yellow" sequence of gothic, eerie tales centering on the eponymous entity in art or (sur)reality; two stories set in Chambers' home country of the US (marked *) and two in the fin de siècle's default setting for perversity, Paris (marked **). These form what deels like a failed novel; like Chambers was heading for a larger goal but, for whatever reason, chose not to go there. I wondered if he simply lost interest once he thought to set the stories acrually *in* Paris, Sodom on the Seine working its decadent way on him as much as on his characters.

The remaining stories are only occasionally tinged with gothic overtones. They tend more towards romantic fiction in the older sense. They're not about modern concerns with coupling up and finding love, they're about the grand emotional sweeps and swoops of Romanticism. It's all very beautifully presented by Pushkin Press in this Deluxe edition.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the nine stories are herein dealt with by the Bryce Method of a short response to the story, a rating of it on its own, and the collection's gestalt being the overall rating.

**The Repairer of Reputations limns the iea of "have you found the Yellow Sign?" into your awareness. It is a strange, haunting, unsettling thing this sogn; it plays on arrogant narcissism ("Mr. Wilde" eh?) to induce paranoia which becomes the impetus for seeking it and the punishment fo seeking it at the same time. Deeply disturbing, very humidly told. 4.5*

*The Mask brings in the play "The King in Yellow," merely reading it will send a person into a spiral of madness! It unhinges all who dare to open it! Talk about a sales job, there's no better way to get huge sales for something than this except maybe banning it on grounds of immorality.

The sufferings of the artist who, drawn to experience these extreme things for Love (of course), mesh with weird period-appropriate pseudoscience in a fun but very, very 1890s way. 4.5*

*In the Court of the Dragon is so flippin' bizarre...why does the old weirdo want the guy's soul? What's the way he knows the guy's soul is of such interest and value? I fear this line of mental inquiry is why I'm just not a gothic-story habitué, but it's sure got the trappings of the best ones! 4*

**The Yellow Sign a coffin worm?!? *shudder* 4*

The Demoiselle d'Ys tells a very charming, if kind of trite in the twenty-first century, time-travel romance (in our modern usage). Left a mildly pleasant but very indistinct impression on me. 3*

The Prophets' Paradise compiles a series of prose poems that expand on the love, hubris, and dangerous supernatural bargaining of the first four stories' characters. Seems odd to me not to put it *within* those stories but permaybehaps Author Chambers didn't think of these small moments in time to do so...expanding the quotation from "The King in Yellow" that open the cycle's stories. 3.75*

The Street of the Four Winds is a Parisian tragic story in the era's typical style, with ruin and disaster following on from following a neighbor's cat. Very apt. 3*

The Street of the First Shell tells a deeply sorrowful tale set during the Siege of Paris (1870 through 1871), with tragic results from terrible decisions and awful actions forced by the cruelest of fates. 3.75* despite the melodrama (or because of it, NGL)

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields is another "bohemians bohemianing unoriginally across the dirty foreign streets of dirty foreign Paris' dirty foreign immoral soil." Spare me. 2.5*

Rue Barrée see above, only the story's as sick of the story as I am. Made it more fun to read. 3*
It's a beautiful object, and will no doubt be welcome for decorative value. I think many a gothic-story reader will get one, and that will be its fate. Sometimes it's not great to meet your heroes in person.

THE CHILDREN, YA fantasy monadnock looks at the storytelling tapestry from the other side

THE CHILDREN
MELISSA ALBERT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn't seem so scary a moment ago. It's a story for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Does George RR Martin have kids? Maybe one called "Dayana" or something? He's on track to die before agreeing to finish his astoundingly beloved fantasy series, like Edith...and to many of us not-fans it feels as though there's some kinda dark bargain involved in its globe-spanning popularity.

In the age of severely overprivileged fandoms for what is revoltingly, but accurately, called "IP," this story could not cut closer to the bone. There's a certain inevitability in Edith's appalling betrayal of her children, using them as close models for her fantasy characters. "Write what you know" taken to a dark extreme by a parent who gave little but took much. A bargain her children had no say over. It supports them to this good day. In a sense that's fair enough since it took their developmental years out of their own control.

Guin is the kid who bought in, albeit resentfully, to the hype and has become an apologist for Edith and her invasive behavior. Perhaps she's just making hay while the sun shines, perhaps she's getting her own back for the neglect and emotional absence of her self-centered parents...failed actor father, family-supporting writer mother. She's created a hollow kind of fame out of monetizing her childhood marked by the celebrity lifestyle her parents cultivated in place of actually being parents. Guin's project is to keep the spondulix rolling in. Brother Ennis has chosen a more rigorous path, though still cashing in on his beginnings, by becoming An Artist. Fame has followed, but he's chosen to cut Guin out of his life. Throughout this story we're in Guin's PoV so we're only told what she knows about why.


"Guinevere" is a terrible name to hang on a kid. It practically slams the door on an ordinary childhood because the teasing would be brutal. It's really of a piece with Edith's fantasy life-turned-hugely successful fantasy world: Guin's fated to be an unhappy princess who's become a queen in a realm not her own, and not of her choosing. "Nomen est omen" test case number skatey-eight skabillion. It feels as we're reading along as though Author Albert, author of multiple popular children's books, started wondering about how this creation thing works as a force outside your authorial control. It's clear Guin is traumatized. By what? Her parents are the first in line for blame. But she and Ennis are orphans. The fire that consumed their childhood home and killed their not-good parents was not caused by the parents themselves. What did cause it? How does...does...that unsolved mystery explain Edith's massive cultural juggernaut "The Ninth City?" It's eaten their lives, not knowing but knowing too much, not understanding but seeing more than they should. Ennis isn't working with Guin on solving what she sees as a strange mystery. It is as always up to Guin to do the work, shoulder the burden.

Author Albert uses the psychological reality of Guin's parentification to explore women's roles in our capitalist culture. It's also clear that there are...oddnesses...in this family system that clearly come from the psychological stress of bearing all the load on the females, woman and girl, in the system. When one looks at it out of the corner of one's eye there are ununsual things that cause unease in we-the-reader. They're not remarked on or attended to in the narrative. They are there and quite uneasy-making though...the woods, how cliche, have eyes and are watching you.

The fire destroys as fires do. No more parents, no more books to keep the mmoney comingin, no more brother because he buggers off leaving it to Guin to pick up such pieces as she can to make what she—she alone—will from the wreckage. The number of abandonments Guin suffers would warp anyone in her shoes. Her response...to take it all on, put it to the best use she can...is what fuels this novel of reckoning with her ghosts.

Literal ghosts? Probably, at least of a sort. Edith might not have been as inventive as her adoring and demanding fan base thinks.

It's here the missing fifth star is explained. The tinges of horror, of fantastical things not seen just beyond our line of sight, all crystallize in the last approximately ten percent of the story. I saw why, and saw the point, but I'm less interested in the fantastical than in the truly chilling psychological novel that precedes the ending. That is not to criticize the ending as a natural result of the preceding story. It absolutely fits, it's quite clearly signposted early on. It's definitely one of several possible results of the story as told.

Just not the one I would've preferred.

DAGGERMOUTH, start of a dark fantasy series very relevant to the world of 2026

DAGGERMOUTH (The Heart #1)
H.M. WOLFE
Scarlett Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, availble now

Rating: 4 wincing stars of five

The Publisher Says: Set in a corrupt surveillance state ruled by the masked elite, this true enemies-to-lovers dystopian romance that’s Conform meets V For Vendetta follows a mercenary who botches the assassination of the president’s son and ends up forced to marry him.

The first thing you’ll learn in New Found Haven is that mercy doesn’t exist. The second thing is that, from the highest glass atrium in the Heart to the windowless slums of the Boundary, the Veyra are always watching.

The last lesson is the hardest, but you must remember it: Love outside of your ring is a death sentence.

The city is carved into rings of privilege and poverty, ruled by the masked elite who will do whatever it takes to hold onto power. Obedience is demanded. Rebellion is crushed.

Greyson Serel has spent his life caught between two worlds. Publicly, he’s the flawless heir to the presidency. Privately, he’s entangled in secrets that could topple the regime. But when he’s forced into a political marriage meant to bind him tighter to the government’s brutal laws, he finds himself shackled to a bride as lethal as she is unwilling.

Shadera Kael is a mercenary raised to kill, not to wed. Yet when her bullet misses its mark, survival leaves her tied to the very man she was sent to eliminate. Trapped inside the corrupt heart of the city, she becomes both prisoner and wife, her every step watched, her every move tested.

Their union is no love story—it’s a battlefield. As secrets come to light and betrayals fester within the walls of power, Greyson and Shadera must decide between annihilating each other or burning the city to the ground together.

In a world where passion has consequences and loyalty is paid for in blood, their forced bond may be the spark that ignites a revolution. Or the fire that consumes them both.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read almost 550 pages of a "romance" I was the opposite of invested in. I prefer reading about romances I find involving, those between men; I'm willing read them about women finding and falling for each other; but men falling for women? Not on my Kindle. So I screwed up when I said yes to this DRC. I opened it to get it over with, write my "not for me" dismissal, and vowed to learn from my mistake.

Then I started reading, and the voice hooked me. "The first thing you'll learn in New Found Haven is that mercy no longer exists. Mercy is a weakness, and weakness will get you killed."

I'm sat.

I was able to flip past the "open-door" sex scenes, a term I had not realized was now mainstream enough to be in the publisher's comprehensive content warnings (as an aside, they also have a trigger statement with directions to the mental-health helpline, which...well, good on ya guys), and get absorbed into this only-slightly-darker than reality take on politics, social stratification, and populations under rigid control.

It's first in a set, a duology per the sales material though I suspect if this builds a goodly Tumblr, Threads, and/or Reddit following it could go farther into the world it's created. Goodness knows the potential is there, the commentary on the current state of the world is trenchant and tendentious, while the delineation of boundaries is sharp enough to slice a finger carelessly placed right off.

There's a great deal of strategic maneuvering once the promised rebellion begins, all explained in what might be too much detail for the romantasy-lite reader. I was happy, and involved, and invested. There is a lot of dystopia-defining detail that, honestly, could be pruned...cracks in things are on-the-nose after two, maybe three, iterations. The oppressive reality of living under surveillance is familiar to me as someone who lives in the *heavily* surveilled Bronx, with police cameras literally everywhere including on the light standard a floor below me outside my window. In Long Beach, the boardwalk had cameras everywhere as well. It's the reality of life under capitalism, where all those cameras had to be purchased, maintained, and then the collected data processed...for a fee.

So the read was, for me anyway, useless for the romance but terrific as a warning of "that's the way this parade is headed." I think the couple got together, don't quote me on that they coulda been cheating on each other for all I care; but the FMC is interesting from the beginning and, in a last-minute reveal of a secret, only becomes more so and thus points the next story in a really interesting direction.

This would be an almost-five-star warble of delight absent heteronormativity.

Perfection is not of this Earth.

THE WINDS OF MARACAIBO: A Novel, deeply felt, beautifully said family saga

THE WINDS OF MARACAIBO: A Novel
MARÍA ELENA MORÁN (tr. Madeline Jones)
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive family drama, the story of a woman determined to recover her kidnapped daughter in the ruins of Chávez’s social revolution—the fast-paced English-language debut of an award-winning and bestselling author that brings the Venezuelan migrant crisis to life in lyrical, seething prose, for readers of Elizabeth Acevedo, Jesmyn Ward, and Gabriela Garcia

It was too late, y la ternura no basta—now that she’d tasted the gunpowder, and the gunpowder was bolivariano, revolutionary. And that unthinkable traitor Camilo was using it to blow up her life.

“Elisa left with Camilo.” “Camilo took her out of the country.”

These are the text messages Nina receives while living in the storage room of a university in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she’s cleaning houses to make money to send back home.

Home is 4,500 miles away, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the water never runs on Mondays and there’s yet another blackout. Where a trip to the grocery store costs 220 times the minimum wage.

Home is Elisa, her thirteen-year-old daughter, who loves to run around the house and belt out Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Who should be growing, when instead her waist is shrinking. Home is Graciela, Nina's mother, who lately stays shut up in her room all day talking with her dead, most urgently her beloved husband, Raúl (who’s just as eager to talk back from the grave).

And what the hell does Camilo think he’s doing now, stealing off with their daughter to the United States of America—the one place Nina most assuredly never wants to call home?

Narrated through the voices of Nina and her family, and through the voice of her treacherous ex, Camilo, The Winds of Maracaibo is the heart-racing tale of a mother fighting to get her daughter back across the border, at any cost—a brave and furious reversal of the American Dream and an ode to the Venezuelan women who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to a nation dismantled by the egos of men.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I wonder how many people in the US will make it past the brutal evocation of what our government's calculated-to-immiserate destruction of Venezuela's civil society resulted in. It's almost a third, more than a quarter, of the beginning of the book. This is a country our regime hates enough to have kidnapped its sitting president and first lady because they wouldn't pay the vig that was demanded of them.

The living and the dead speak to us. It's a narrative structure that will take some time to settle into, though I think it's less off-putting than the rage they all feel, the terrible emotional toll they've paid and keep paying in this manufactured chaos, and the terrible decisions they make under its duress. I was so deeply offended by the intended-yet-impersonal misery and chaos they all, in their different ways, endure. My human fellow feeling circuits overheated multiple times.

The awful truth of people living under occupation and under economic sanctions is that they are not capable of...do not have the capacity to think...any thinking beyond the shortest of horizons. That's what survival mode does to a human being. It makes the people in its toils easily manipulable, its real intent, but it also causes their moral capacities to...short circuit, is my best approximation.

Camilo, lookin' right at you, miserable "enchufado" bastard. (Really worth looking up, Anglophones.)

The recent history, the past thirty years or so, of Venezuela has been dominated by Hugo Chávez and his disrupted revolution. One guess who did the disrupting...the results of that reformist binge collapsing have been horrendous for average Venezualans like Nina. She's forced to leave her young daughter Elisa with her own mother Graciela, recently widowed by Raúl's death and struggling emotionally, financially, and practically. Elisa is thus parentified much to her resentful fury, which means when Nina's father Camilo shows back up with the idea of moving to the US so as to earn their money there, Elisa jumps at the chance to be a kid again.

Nina finds out when Graciela thinks to tell her Camilo's got Elisa now and they went to the US. Tank goodness, right? No! Nina's carrying a load of fury towards the US for its wanton destruction of her country, a thing that seems not to bother Camilo and exists in the same nebulous faraway as the rest of reality to Graciela. None of this happens as neatly as I'm presenting it to you. All those PoVs are following each other but not linearly, rather in twining braids of recursion. It's not direct but it felt more like I was in the natural process of getting to know the characters.

Given that I related most powerfully to the highly principled Elisa, who rejected Camilo and all he represented because he should only rot under the pile of money he's stolen from worthier needier people, you might feel surprise when I say Raúl's PoV, anguished for the unhappy present of the family he loves and annoyed he can't make them see sense, was the one that often moved me to tears. Graciela is overmatched by reality and Elisa is warping under the strain of growing up too fast. Nina is rigidly refusing to budge an inch; great for a single person but not for a mom.

It's a moving, enlightening family saga of mess, real-feeling people, and a very lovely story to read.

Until you think about what it means.

Sleep tight GOP voters.

THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness, poetic and beautiful subject and discussion

THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness
CAL FLYN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical exploration of the world’s wildest, most forbiddingly remote places—and the humans who have always been there, by an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer

From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.

But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she finds that such truly untouched lands don't Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds running off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds—deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts—asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Travel writing in the poetic mode:

Wolves, bears, the wild beasts of all kinds: those that frighten us, thrill us, go bump in the night. It's what's missing, they say, from the tight-leashed land: those lamplight eyes in the dark. Without them, without that element of fear, however faint or unformed, our relationship with the land is incomplete.

"If wildlife is removed," the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, "although everything else remains visibly the same, the intensity of the sense of wilderness is diminished!"

In other words: the fear is a part of it.

In the course of seeking out wilderness, Author Flyn makes the not-new case that "wilderness" is a societal construcy, it's about defining who gets to go where in the end..."wilderness" is reserved, apart from daily use for the great mass of people.

It's beautifully written...see quote above...but peculiarly impersonal. It's her musings, it's entirely about her responses to and thoughts about places the majority can never access. And, as the world shrinks and we humans use more and more of it for ourselves, a privileged subset of us have decided to define pieces of the world as "wild" thus off limits to the likes of you. You happen to live there? Move. This is wilderness now. I didn't see a lot of depth in her presentation of the responses to these diktats from indigenous people, but those stories are huge, deep, and outside this impressionist work's scope. I was sent off to look for the displaced's voices elsewhere—and a salutary reminder it was.

Auhor Flyn goes deep enough to present the inevitable, fundamentally irresolvable tension between the needs of humanity and the requirements of the planet's flora and animalia. It's not the first time I've read this story...Annie Dillard was my own first encounter with poetic prose telling nature's side of the story...but it is very well-made indeed.

Anyone who rethinks the relationship of human and nature has taken on an immense task, one that can't be finished, or even really grasped, in one book. Or one lifetime. We're always in need of people who look over the edges, across the horizons, under the fences, and tell us about what they saw and what they think it means. It's a perspective check...it's never possible for one person to see through all the other eyes there are looking at the world, perceiving it as we don't, even can't. It's the ultimate purpose of reading, acquiring those other perspectives in the best (albeit necessarily incomplete and skewed) way we can.

You know the lore of the woods in the 21st century, you most likely consume the stories about the denizens of the wild places on your TV. You most likely are watching vampire and werewolf media all the time. That mode of seeing these spaces has roots. Let Author Flyn show them to you, describe their planting and limn their growth for you; it will likely change how, even what, you see.

That's the point of reading, after all.

BEGINNING MIDDLE END, Luiselli speaks infrequently but always eloquently and elegantly

BEGINNING MIDDLE END
VALERIA LUISELLI
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 28 July 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?

Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

As a mission statement you don't get a lot clearer than that one, the simple reflection on how hard it is to create a story afresh. The women in this story are unnamed, because naming is a deterministic act, a story's half over when you're named because identity isn't fluid after that. A label like mother or daughter is subject to refinement...whose mother? daughter of whom?...but a name stops the question, collapses the possibility in the narrative by making in the identity "mother" or "daughter" concrete to that one person.

Sicily's ancient land is littered with bits and fragments of many identities that seemed immovable in other times. Ruins of homes, temples, fields, volcanoes, none in their original condition and most only tentatively identified and that with modern superimposed names that we use in place of older names from other stories that built, were built from, other identities. What better place to tell the story of telling the story of building anew identities that were never anything except conditional.

Volcanic violent emotions are everywhere in this story of re/invention. The women are scraped raw and still bleeding without bandages or protection for their wounds as the mother's book tour takes them to this ancient place of ancestral memory for them both. With them is a piece of Classical foreknowledge...a head of Proteus...that belongs in this restless shaky earth because he came from here. And how fitting: coming home in the hands of people reduced to relationship, deprived of the story they shared by loss, amputation, severing of a former castmate; here Proteus and continue a fragment of the story this fragment of a created piece of an idea of his physical form, this godly figment of millions of minds back on eruptive, earthquakey home soil (not even the sea he was an assistant god of in those fevered imaginings). It is the story of this story in a hand-holdable bit of broken-off antique knick-knack.

Mother and daughter move through this not-really native ancestral world, mother doing the mother thing by wondering if her daughter is really going to be the woman she sees coming into focus. Is the Proteus a stolen fragment of patrimony, or a piece of the homeland carted to a frightening new world by a feisty, scared girl shifted by her needs into a simulacrum of male freedom? Does this mean there is a hard-edged channel for the fast-flooding rage of the world in her daughter, or is the idea of belonging uniquely to a time and a place moving her feelings into Earthly action on Proteus' behalf?

Stories have no beginning middle end. We impose those ideas on the world. Time...that thing we are slaves to, are shackled on the side of being dragged along always trying not to be crushed under the wheels of the misunderstood, mischaracterized "juggernaut"...has no inherent direction, the equations don't define beginning middle end. It isn't the gods, then, that created time. That was us.

So here are two women out of place and out of their time, defining new beginnings middles ends with Author Luiselli sweeping the temple steps for their ascent. It is masterful work. It deserves to define your time as beginning middle end.

July 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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I Who Have Never Known Men by by Jacqueline Harpman (tr. Ros Schwartz)

Real Rating: 4.8* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

The Publisher Says: Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US TO STAY ALIVE!

My Review: Library borrow, to read before the story collection reviewed here: WE WERE FORBIDDEN, three stories from a feminist author at her tendentious best. This is an SFnal story about how very awful it is to be a woman. Since the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it *is* dreadful to be a woman, I've got nothing clever to say about it.

Most agreeable-to-me prose style as ably rendered into English by Translator Schwartz, it feels...pithy, almost aphoristic.

Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) EXPECTS $15.99 from you before you open the ebook.

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The Simp: A Novel Without a Hero by Roshan Sethi

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A novel without a hero. Hellscape with an infinity pool.

Raj Ladlani is an unemployable actor. He has reasons to believe he is spectacularly talented (his beloved acting coach Anthony says so), a legend in every way but for the success.

His anonymous life working at Yogurtland, obsessively reading Vanity Fair, and fantasizing about stardom, comes to an end when he answers a job ad detailing a relentless, laughable parade of menial responsibilities for a "Hollywood Family." So begins the astonishing decline and fall of Raj Ladlani.

The Simp tells the story of Raj's momentous employment with the H Family and the destruction that follows in the wake of his time with the with Jim H, a massive and macho director in a creative rut. Anna H might uncharitably be described as his much younger trophy wife, quietly and neurotically seeking out her own independent sense of purpose as a screenwriter. Raj’s work as their executive assistant becomes his new sense of soaring purpose. But he procured the job through a sea of lies.

And when the job reveals itself to be an absurdist walk through affluent domestic chaos and misguided engagements with identity politics, Raj might be about to lose it—on a very public stage.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Line of Beauty. Saltburn. The world of wealth and its attendant privileges is of never-ending fascination for the have-nots. Is another iteration, with a South Asian protagonist, adding to the conversation or cashing in on the gossip?

Yes...both...and bloodily flensing the fakeness of it all, class, ethnicity, hype, all of it. Not as much LOL-funny as it is mordant.

Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) takes $14.99 from you to legally read the ebook. It will fit a mood, or else skip it.

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A Human Business: The People-First Model for Lasting Success by Glenn Bostock

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For too long, business leaders have operated under the assumption that maximizing profit requires minimizing humanity. The result is widespread employee disengagement, toxic workplace cultures, and organizations that drain rather than energize their people.

A Human Business challenges this paradigm with a proven alternative. Drawing from forty years building SnapCab from a small cabinet shop to an international manufacturing company, Glenn Bostock demonstrates how modeling your organization after the human body creates communities where people thrive.

Inside, you will discover:

how to create a foundation of caring that attracts and retains exceptional talent

identify and leverage what you and your team genuinely love doing

shift focus from profit-chasing to value-creation through usefulness

build interdependent systems where every department serves shared intentions

Through vulnerable personal stories and practical business applications, Bostock reveals how dyslexia and learning disabilities became unexpected assets in building a company culture that values accessibility over expertise, collaboration over competition, and purpose over profit alone.

Whether launching a startup or transforming an established organization, A Human Business provides the framework for creating workplaces where people want to spend their days—and where sustainable success follows naturally.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Three stars for the time-tested advice to get to know the people, treat them with respect and honor, and allow them to grow under your care. The extra half-star is for the genuinely vulnerable revelations of how Author Bostock learned to take these ancient nuggets of wisdom to heart, apply them to his own business, and reap generous rewards therefrom.

Life changing for some, perhaps, good for all to read as a reminder of how to behave and why, and not at all hard to plow through.

Forbes Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) offers an ebook for 99¢. I bought one just to show solidarity with the author and publisher for being so very generous.

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Nothing in Moderation: A Psychedelic Reckoning With Excess by Shep Rose

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Shep Rose thought he had life figured out.

As one of the breakout stars of Bravo's Southern Charm, he'd built a reputation as Charleston's ultimate good-time guy: charismatic, adventurous, and always ready for the next party. His mantra? Say yes. Say yes to every invitation, every adventure, every opportunity for excess. For years, it worked beautifully, bringing him a successful television career, incredible experiences around the world, and the kind of life most people only dream about.

But by November 2023, that same approach had become dangerous. A blackout weekend at BravoCon in Las Vegas, complete with drugs, gambling binges, and behavior he couldn't even remember, culminated in a sobering phone call from Andy Cohen himself. The message was clear: change or lose everything.

Instead of deploying more traditional methods, Shep made an unconventional choice. At the recommendation of a Navy SEAL friend who'd found his own healing there, Shep flew to Costa Rica to spend a week at Rythmia, participating in four consecutive nights of Ayahuasca ceremonies. What followed was the most transformative, terrifying, and enlightening experience of his life.

In this remarkably honest memoir, Shep chronicles his journey with vivid detail and his signature humor. From his first ceremony, where he saw himself as the pole of an amusement park ride that could send everyone flying if he wasn't stable, to the profound night when he witnessed "the machine" and underwent spiritual heart surgery, each experience peeled back another layer of self-deception and forced him to confront uncomfortable truths.

This book is about the universal struggle between who we think we are and who we've actually become. It's about the fine line between being the life of the party and being destructively out of control. It's about learning that vulnerability isn't weakness and that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit you need help.

Written with the same authenticity that's made him a fan favorite for over a decade, Shep shares not just the mystical visions and profound realizations, but also the awkward moments, the embarrassing incidents, and the ongoing work of integration after the ceremonies ended. He doesn't pretend to have all the answers or to be "cured." Instead, he offers something more valuable: an honest account of one man's attempt to course correct before it's too late.

Whether you've struggled with your own relationship to excess, questioned whether your greatest strengths might also be your biggest weaknesses, or simply wondered what it's really like to drink Ayahuasca with a shaman in the Costa Rican jungle, this book offers insights, laughs, and the kind of raw honesty that's increasingly rare in our curated world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Earnest, heartfelt prose telling the self-discovery story again. I myownself will attest to ayahuasca's efficacy as a self-discovery tool from forty-plus-year-old experience...nothing beats altering perceptions of reality as an aid to gaining perspective on life, the past, and the path forward best to take: Pursue honesty and behave compassionately, starting with yourself.

DO NOT TRY IT ALONE. Always seek guidance, always verify your guide's trustworthiness because honest people welcome scrutiny.

Advantage Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $9.99 for an ebook. Worth the price if you need the nudge to take the reins of your life.

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The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder (Antique Hunter’s #1) by C.L. Miller

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In this irresistible and thrilling debut novel, a former antique hunter investigates a suspicious death at an isolated English manor, embroiling her back in the dangerous world of tracking stolen artifacts.

What antique would you kill for?

Freya Lockwood is shocked when she learns that Arthur Crockleford, antiques dealer and her estranged mentor, has died under mysterious circumstances. She has spent the last twenty years avoiding her quaint English hometown, but when she receives a letter from Arthur asking her to investigate—sent just days before his death—Freya has no choice but to return to a life she had sworn to leave behind.

Joining forces with her eccentric Aunt Carole, Freya follows clues and her instincts to an old manor house for an advertised antiques enthusiast’s weekend. But not all is as it seems. It’s clear to Freya that the antiques are all just poor reproductions and her fellow guests are secretive and menacing. What is going on at this estate and how was Arthur involved? More importantly, can Freya and Carole discover the truth before the killer strikes again?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very much on board with the "return your spoliated goods" message; the precise target audience for the Antiques Roadshow provenance of the story; loved the tidbit about the author being one of the show's expert's daughter!

The mystery itself was competent but journeyman-level work. It's not bad but it should only get better from here.

Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) would like you to be so genteel as to surreptitiously slip $13.99 onto the electronic butler's digital visiting card tray before you open that ebook.

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The Antique Hunter's Death on the Red Sea (Antique Hunter’s #2) by C.L. Miller

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this follow-up to the USA TODAY bestselling “utterly charming mystery” (Robyn Harding, author The Party) The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder, Freya Lockwood and Aunt Carole are on the hunt once again to return priceless stolen antiques and catch a dangerous criminal aboard a cruise ship.

When a painting vanishes from a maritime museum and a dead body is found nearby, the newly established Lockwood Antique Hunter’s Agency, Freya Lockwood and her Aunt Carole, are called to investigate.

Following a lead that takes them aboard a glamorous antiques cruise sailing toward the Red Sea in Jordan, they quickly discover that the ships art gallery is filled with stolen antiquities. Each antique is also listed in Freya’s late mentor’s journals that detail unsolved cases. In chasing a murderer with a stolen painting, they may have found something more sinister than they could’ve imagined…

Their hunt soon turns deadly when they learn the enigmatic and dangerous art trafficker named The Collector could be on board. But on a ship full of antiques enthusiasts—plus some unexpected familiar faces—will Freya and Carole be able to discover the Collector’s identity and stop his murderous plans before the ship docks? Or will the killer strike again?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Again, I batten on each element of the story: bottled on a cruise ship, antique collectors with grudges old enough to have grand-grudges end up one terrible old greedy snot down, while on the quite stunning Red Sea. None of it quite jells.

"The Collector" who is the anonymous Big Bad would've been a cute narrative device on TV. Think Lovejoy on The Love Boat. Alas, an authorial hand more suited to Kojak was at work.

Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) still wants $13.99 for the ebook. Mmmaaaybe, but the library's free.

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The Antique Hunter's Murder in the Castle (Antique Hunter’s #3) by C.L. Miller

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The third novel in the “delightful, page-turning” (Tom Ryan, USA TODAY bestselling author) Antique Hunter Series finds Freya, Aunt Carole, and friends searching for a missing colleague in picturesque Scotland.

Hot on the heels of an art forger, a member of the Lockwood Antique Hunter’s Agency disappears while investigating an isolated castle deep in Scottish countryside. Freya and Aunt Carole race to her last known location and arrive in the wintry, snow-covered Scottish Borders.

At the castle, they discover that a murdered laird in the vegetable garden and his priceless collection of silverware has been stolen. Local police believe Freya’s missing team member was involved with the robbery and murder...but where is she now?

As a snowstorm descends on the castle, Freya and Carole call in back-up to help uncover what happened that fateful night. As each question is met with more mystery, the clock is ticking to find their friend and the murderer before they are cut off from the outside world.

Another delightfully gripping and endearing mystery, the Antique Hunter’s Series provides “great characters, great story, and you’re always eager for the next one” (Ian Moore, author of Death and Croissants).

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Look at that praise, from reputable authors! And here I sit with my teeth in my mouth.

No more. Atria should not try this author on me again because I'm not a good fit for this prose.

Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) now wants $14.99 for an ebook! Gadzooks and godzilla!

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A Lark's Gambit (A Verity Lark Mystery #6) by Lynn Messina

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Oh, dear. Is that the Marquess of Ware enjoying a pipe in the very same upscale opium den as Verity Lark?

It is, yes.
Wonderful.

Now she must inform her suitor, Colson Hardwicke, of his father’s unsavory habit—which means she will have to reveal that she herself had been partaking in the very next berth.

He will understand.

Once she explains that the den is above the fish seller whose poppy trade she has been monitoring for months, he will totally get it. As London’s most intrepid reporter and dogged gossipmonger, she is duty bound to get to the bottom of the mystery.

What Hardwicke might find a little harder to accept is why she was kissing the marquess in a darkened room during a fashionable society affair.

That is a slightly more complicated story.

Alas, with a killer stalking her, she might not have a chance to tell it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a deeply, intricately interconnected Messina-verse. Verity Lark and Beatrice Hyde-Clare are the poles the puzzles to be solved in the stories anchor to. The reason Author Messina chose two bluestockings to hold up her stories is obvious: Aren't you damn good and sick of YET ANOTHER marriage plot?

Bridgerton notwithstanding, it's time to move 2026 past 1806's mores, if not manners and speech patterns because those're still heaps of fun. Verity's a ballsy Lady Whistledown with serious Ida Tarbell vibes.

I won't pretend this is Heyer territory, all champagne bubbles and gooseberry fool served to noddycocks by discreet servants. It's still well-thought-out fun, puzzling stories that hang on details you missed; no easy solves with Verity! You *do* need to read them in order, though. I recommend starting with A Lark's Tale to get properly oriented, the proceed at your own pace...likely apace...to savor the fun.

Potatoworks Press (non-affiliate Amazon link) will need $6.99 for you to get into that Kindlebook.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Goodbye Chinatown (28%) by Kit Fan

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown.

Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London. That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy?

Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Goodbye Chinatown shows a family torn between two countries. Amber throws herself into her career to escape the painful cycle of family separations and reunions.

The tastes and smells spark off every page in Kit Fan’s latest novel, making for a truly multisensorial reading experience. Offering a behind-the-scenes of this suburb of London’s hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising émigré who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I tapped out in chapter 13:

Amber smiled. She'd just closed the kitchen and agreed to meet Celeste outside in five minutes. She came out wearing a tight pair of Levi's and a loose russet jacket and kissed Celeste's cheeks.She told her she'd have put her on the VIP list if she'd rung.

Which she? Who "her"? What's "her" jacket got to do with anything except making me picture "her" as a potato? (Russet, see, and unattached to any other concept but closely associated with a kitchen = spud.) Craft failures for author *and* editor.

It's just too hard to connect all those dots tentatively because who knows if I'm getting the referents right, who knows what I'm supposed to think about "her" sincerity over the VIP list, or about "her" place on it...or control over it...?

World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) would like $14.99 for you to read the book. Try a sample first.

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Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth (30%) by Zahid R. Chaudhary

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.

Today’s paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics do.

Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I had to give up my battle against academic prose when Author Zahid says, oh so casually, "Hence, as well, elaborate rationalizations by right-wing politicians for the kind of manipulative work engaged in surreptitiously by Cambridge Analytica (which has become more common and less scandalous since the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018.)"

I felt a T.I.A. in my immediate future as the import of that statement sat longer and longer in my craw, stuck fast. Self-defensively, then, I called it and closed my Kindle at that point.

Fordham University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) would like $26.99 for ebook access. If you're up to it....