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The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
Dec 31st, 2025
Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water is not a memoir that eases the reader in. It grabs, shocks, and unsettles, insisting on intimacy from the first page. Her writing is jarringly personal, often breaking the unspoken contract between author and reader. When Yuknavitch writes, “I kind of don’t want to tell you this,” or later admits, “Listen. Happiness? It just looks different on people like me,” she dismantles any illusion of polished self-presentation. What emerges instead is a voice that is raw, fragmented, and brutally honest.
THE ROAD TO BELONGING: My Journey to Punta Gorda, Belize by Francis Mandewah
Dec 15th, 2025
In The Road to Belonging: My Journey to Punta Gorda, Belize, Francis Mandeweh offers a beautifully written memoir about migration and the human search for home. After a 14-year career as a probation and parole officer in Milwaukee, Mandeweh decides to retire and seek a place where he can finally feel a sense of peace and belonging. What unfolds is not simply a retirement story, but an exploration of identity, displacement, cultural connection, and a final triumph.
It All Felt Impossible by Tom McAllister
Dec 1st, 2025
Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossible is an unassuming, quietly profound book of essays that traces a life through the simplest possible structure: one piece for each year of the author’s life, starting in 1982.
That premise may sound a little simplistic, but McAllister turns it into something tender and revealing. Rather than simply ticking off milestones, like his first job, first heartbreak, marriage, career, he reaches into the hidden corners of memory and mixes in all the “life” that happens on the peripheries.
The Book of Men (Poems) by Dorianne Laux
Nov 15, 2025
In Dorianne Laux’s poetry collection, The Book of Men, she shares poems about her life, her daily thoughts, and the small moments she experiences. The book starts (predictably) with poems about men: famous men, ordinary men, and men she has known or simply seen from a distance. But as you read, the focus grows wider. The poems explore bigger themes like memory, getting older, dealing with loss, and finding kindness even in a difficult world.
Laux’s writing style is clear and simple. Yet there’s a weight of emotion behind every line. The book is dotted with poems about everyday life, except that everyday life can be sobering and even traumatic. In fact, her poems feel strongest when she shares slivers from her own past, details that seem taken straight from a photo album. Honest, emotional details that are relatable to almost anyone.
Ark Debt by Ken Cheney
Nov 1, 2025
Ark Debt has a lot in common with Hugh Howey’s Silo. Like Silo, it takes place after the collapse of Earth where humanity survives only by holding on to an illusion of order. The story moves between two timelines: one showing the world’s environmental collapse and the rise of greedy corporations, and the other following a new generation rebelling inside a massive underground structure called the Ark. Through the stories of Dr. Anya Sharma, her granddaughter Maya, and a hero named Liam Stewart, the book explores themes of environmental damage, digital control, and the human desire for freedom.
Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
Oct 15, 2025
“So this story is a truth – one of many.” This is how Lilly Dancyger begins Negative Space, her deeply personal memoir about the complicated bond between a father and daughter. Most memoirs written by children of drug-addicted parents often depict a love-hate relationship. Or rather, an angry, hateful child trying to find ways to love. Lilly’s story is surprisingly different. Her love and ache for her missing father are all-consuming, so much so, she dedicates years of her life to investigating his life in order to write this novel.
Eightball by Elizabeth Geoghegan
Oct 1, 2025
Elizabeth Geoghegan has put together a beautiful collection of unsatisfying personal relationships, or certainly the ones that linger in your memory for years, reminding you of loss or failure in your life. What makes these stories powerful isn’t just the heartbreak, but how Geoghegan shows feelings like longing, loneliness, and the middle ground between closeness and separation.