Examines how three transnational groups in Hong Kong use familial narratives to promote critical empathy and decenter the oppressive logics behind dominant citizenship discourses.

“Illuminates with cutting truth the layers of longing and grief which underlie a transracial adoption . . . sharply written, intense, and page-turning.” —Randy Susan Meyers, bestselling author of Waisted Rowan Kelly knows she’s lucky. After all, if she hadn’t been adopted, she could have spent her days in a rice paddy, or a windowless warehouse assembling iPhones—they make iPhones in Korea, right? Either way, slowly dying of boredom on Long Island is surely better than the alternative. But as she matures, she realizes that she’ll never know if she has her mother’s eyes, or if she’d be in America at all had her adoptive parents been able to conceive. Rowan sets out to prove that she can be someone’s first choice. After running away from home—and her parents’ rules—and ending up beaten, barefoot, and topless on a Pennsylvania street courtesy of Bad Boy Number One, Rowan attaches herself to Never-Going-to-Commit. When that doesn’t work out, she fully abandons self-respect and begins browsing Craigslist personals. But as Rowan dives deeper into the world of casual encounters with strangers, she discovers what she’s really looking for. With a fresh voice and a quick wit, Lauren J. Sharkey dispels the myths surrounding transracial adoption, the ties that bind, and what it means to belong. A Finalist for Foreword Review’s 2020 INDIES Book of the Year Award in Adult Fiction—Multicultural “Stirring . . . a moving account of Rowan’s difficult reckoning with her identity. This is an adept portrayal of the long shadow of abuse and the difficulty of being an adoptee.” —Publishers Weekly

A sequel to The Seven-Petaled Shield finds fierce warrior woman Shannivar joining forces with Zevaron, the heir to the magical Seven-Petaled Shield, to battle monstrous stone-drakes from the far northern regions who serve a legendary, evil embodiment of chaos.

“The plot twists ingeniously...an engaging, often chilling book.”—The New York Times Book Review A writer in California. A doctor in Boston. A motel owner and his employee in Nevada. A priest in Chicago. A robber in New York. A little girl in Las Vegas. They’re a handful of people from across the country, living through eerie variations of the same nightmare. A dark memory is calling out to them. And soon they will be drawn together, deep in the heart of a sprawling desert, where the terrifying truth awaits...

Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.