"When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in the springtime of 2011, how can she imagine it might bring her estranged dad, Ethan, crashing back into her life? Ethan is an ex-con and recovering addict who even in his more honest moments has difficulty seeing outside himself. But now he's starting to fear that Jolie's in the kind of trouble her mom, Sarah, could never understand. Convinced that he is the only one who can...

"Izzy Wells-aka burlesque superstar Blue Lenox-doesn't have time for anything more than a hookup. She has a theater to renovate, and turning it into a safe space for queer performers costs money. Money she doesn't have. With the mortgage overdue, the only way she'll save the theater is to win the prize money from the Great American Talent show. And if that means forgetting about the beautiful Black ballerina she spent one night with in order to focus...

"At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there the last when Mozart was seventeen, all vividly recounted here by acclaimed conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous...

"Randon Billings Noble has collected a range of lyric essays in a variety of forms that showcase the essay's openness to experimentation, reliance on authentic voice, and potential to explore complex subject matter"-- "What is a lyric essay? An essay that has a lyrical style? An essay that plays with form in a way that resembles poetry more than prose? Both of these? Or something else entirely? The works in this anthology show lyric essays rely more...