Author: Erica Ezeifedi

This is more of a good idea for summer than a recipe-recipe. You just need a fresh, ripe pineapple, tequila, pineapple juice, simple syrup (or agave), and lime juice. Soak your cut up pineapple over night in the liquid and stick popsicle sticks into each piece the next day. Sprinkle with tajín. For a visual, check out Bustle’s instagram account.

Similar to Taylor’s latest release, The Late Americans, Filthy Animals explores the messy personal lives of young creative people living in the Midwest. Following a stay in a psychiatric hospital, a queer mathematician meets a dancer and enters into a tenuous open relationship with him and his girlfriend. Other stories show the same situation from different perspectives and bring in characters connected to each other, but also struggling with their own relationships.

Keiko Furukura has never quite fit in, but since she was 18 and applied to a convenience store job in Tokyo on a whim, she feels like she at least has some things figured out. Like, she knows how to dress and act when she’s at work in order to look like she belongs, even if there is a “real” her that exists outside this persona. But now at 36, the normalcy she thought she’d maintained since her teenage years starts to crumble once her younger sister gives birth, and those close to Keiko start pressuring her to achieve society-set milestones. Giving in, she attempts a deal of sorts with a questionable co-worker, and though her life now appears to be “normal,” to her it feels like anything but.

Grace Porter has thus far adhered to her strict (and financially supportive) father’s path for her — at only 28, she’s just achieved a PhD in the very white male-dominated field of astronomy. Despite the accomplishment, she doesn’t feel quite fulfilled. And when she goes on a trip to Vegas with friends to celebrate, she totally shakes up her life. By getting married one drunken night. When she wakes to her new wife, Yuki, she decides to stray from the path her father has set, and even her supportive group of friends, to try to make a go of it in New York with Yuki.

I discussed this book not too long ago, but it also fits here perfectly. Ro is freshly 30 and is suspended in the past and is slowly becoming even more unmoored from the present. She has a distant relationship with her mother, her boyfriend broke up with her to colonize Mars, and her bestie is getting married. All she has left is the giant octopus named Dolores that she cares for at her lackluster job at the mall aquarium. But Dolores has been sold to a wealthy investor and will be moved soon. As Dolores leaves Ro’s life, all of Ro’s childhood trauma comes bubbling back to the surface.

I randomly decided to try a Japanese sweet potato when I came across some in a grocery the other day and subsequently wondered where they’d been all my life. If you’ve never had one, they have a drier, fluffier texture than the usual American variety, and are really sweet. Like, sweet sweet (they low-key taste like cake!). I had prepared them as I’d seen before, which is just by cutting them in half and air frying/roasting them, but now I’m going to shimmy my way on back down to the store to try a recipe like this one by Marc Matsumoto. Glazed sweet potatoes are a popular sweet snack in Japan, and are relatively healthy (especially considering what I usually get into).

You’ll need:

Japanese sweet potatoes, oil, brown rice syrup, and black sesame seeds. Matsumoto shows how to prepare it.

This one had me by the throat! It’s a historical YA novel that’s part murder mystery, part haunting, and an immersive look at what life was like for queer Jewish people in the late 1800s. We follow Alter, who now goes by the name his parents gave him instead of the Americanized “Alex.” After having lost his dad on the way to America, he, like so many other Jewish immigrants living in Chicago, is trying his best to survive. He lives in tenement housing with three other young men his age and works at a printing press, scrimping as much as possible to bring his mother and siblings over from Europe. His life gets interrupted when a close friend of him dies, and the police, not wanting to tarnish the image of the Worlds Fair, want to brush it aside as an accident. But Alter knows better, and soon starts to lose his mind as he becomes possessed by his deceased friend’s dybbuk. He has to once again lean on Frankie, a friend from a past life that he had tried to leave behind. A friend that he might want be a little more. Together, they try to free Alter from the dybbuk before it completely takes over.

The award-winning author of books like The Good Lord Bird, Deacon King Kong, and others, writes about his mother’s life. McBride and his 11 other siblings were raised in poverty by a mother who regularly avoided questions about her past, insisting that she was “light-skinned” when asked about her race. Turns out that she was the Polish-born daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe with her family. Once in America, she’d have to flee, still, from her abusive father, and would find solace in Black neighborhoods. McBride speaks of her life — her struggles, her accomplishments — as he does his own.

Here’s another memoir! This time about the half Hawaiian Chinese, half Jewish niece of shoe designer Steve Madden. T Kira Madden grows up at the conflicting intersection of being privileged, biracial, and queer, witnessing firsthand all of the ugly that can come with the lifestyles of the wealthy. Though she lives the lavish life of a daughter within a shoe mogul family, her father’s alcoholism leads to him physically abusing her mother, which is followed by her mother struggling with a drug addiction. Meanwhile, T Kira is left to her own devices. Eventually, she finds her tribe — that is, of fatherless girls — which grants her the support and understanding she had missed in her younger years.

Maybe as a coping mechanism or something else, I feel like there is always some form of gatekeeping that goes on within communities that are targeted and othered. Tamkin explores this within the Jewish community by sifting through the last 100 years of Jewish American life. From the Sephardic Jews who arrived in America in the 1600s, to Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated in large numbers to the U.S. in the early 1900s, and the civil rights era decades later, Tamkin gets to the bottom of what makes a “bad Jew” and what makes a good one. Turns out, the concept of what constitutes as Jewish within the community has shifted through the years.

Though the year feels like it’s zooming by, it also feels like people are super ready for summer. Or, I guess maybe people are always super ready for summer, it’s just that this time, I am too. Either way, I’m looking forward to trying this spicy watermelon lemonade! I’ve never thought to make lemonade spicy, but I have enjoyed the spicy margaritas I’ve tried, and lemonade has similar sweet/tart vibes going on.

Looks like you’ll just need:

– watermelon, cut up

– 4 fresh lemons for juicing

– 1/2 jalapeño

– sugar

– water

Then blend and garnish!

Before we get to the books, don’t forget to check out First Edition, the new podcast started by Book Riot co-founder Jeff O’Neal. It explores the wide bookish world, with interviews, lists, rankings, retrospectives, recommendations, and much more, featuring people who know and love books. Subscribe to First Edition on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcatcher of choice.

This is definitely one of our most-anticipated books of the year. With a premise that involves top women gladiators fighting for their lives within a corrupt prison system, it’s understandable. The author of Friday Black tells the bloody story of Loretta Thurwar and “Hurricane Staxxx,” two women who are friends, lovers, and popular Chain-Gang All-Stars. As All-Stars, they’ve fought against other prisoners in lethal battles to win shortened sentences through a highly contested program that’s run through the controversial Criminal Action Penal Entertainment organization in a (not so) alternative United States. Loretta nears the day she’ll finally be free, but the burden of all she’s done — and still has to do — weighs heavily on her in this damning look at America’s prison industrial complex and culture of violence.

The bestselling author of Cutting for Stone is back with a family saga spanning more than 70 years. The story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi — which essentially translates to “Big Momma” — twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways that her and her would-be family live by in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

Alex is a certified mess, but I have to admit she’s also pretty bold in ways I could never be. After she commits a faux pas at a party, the older man she has a lil something going on with sends her on her way with a ticket back to where she came from. But she’s not ready to leave the bougie part of Long Island and all the potential ways its inhabitants could support her. So she drifts from place to place, using her people-reading skills to melt into each new social situation, seamlessly fitting in..until she doesn’t. Alex is the type of person who has random thoughts about how easy it’d be to steal things she comes across, so while she is pretty morally reprehensible, the narrative of seeing rich people’s worlds shaken up a bit makes for an interesting read. The premise of how she’s able to so easily pass in new social groups says a lot about privilege and race, I think. It also reminds me of a story from awhile back about a woman who pretended to be a German heiress. Supreme mess.

Kuang only writes bangers, and in this one, June witnesses the death of Athena Liu — who just finished a novel that promises to be a masterpiece about Chinese laborers’ contributions to the Allied forces during WWI. June decides to take Athena’s manuscript and claims the story as her own. To take full advantage (because, you know, stealing someone’s book wasn’t enough), she also lets her publisher rebrand her with an Asian-sounding name and an author photo of someone who is racially ambiguous (if you hadn’t guessed, June is white). The book is successful, but June can’t shake the feeling that it could all come tumbling down, and that the truth of Athena is about to be exposed.

*Bonus*: Kuang is interviewed here by author Zakiya Dalila Harris (The Other Black Girl) about the book and what inspired it. Here’s an excerpt I had to include:

“Kuang: “I really like the novelist John Banville and I was reading some interviews he’d done, and he mentioned that once he tried writing in an alternate voice, like a crime thriller, and suddenly he’d written paragraphs and paragraphs, and he thought to himself, ‘John, you slut.’ That’s how I felt drafting the first 3,000 words of Yellowface. It was just pouring out and I thought, ‘Becky, you slut. What are you doing?'”

Kuang, if you’re reading this, this paragraph makes us friends now.

In the late 1800s, Pirbhai, a young Indian boy, becomes a worker indentured to the British in his desperation to find work. He’s taken to East Africa to work on the East African Railway, where he’s pressured to commit an act that will haunt him and his family for generations. His children grow up in a Uganda that is starting to divest from British rule, and eventually his descendants have to leave because of Idi Amin’s South Asian expulsion. They end up in different parts of the world, with some eventually finding each other again in Canada. This covers five generations of a family with lives spread out over four continents as they reckon with what they’ve done and lost in the name of survival.