How to apologize for wanting some word, some story, some beautiful thing for my own?

You made a haunted house out of your own flesh and bones.

An anthology of short stories by Black authors redefining the horror genre.

A dark fiction anthology by indigenous writers.

How many women throughout history were blamed for the weaknesses of men? We made such convenient scapegoats. We were raised to be small, to be silent, to take whatever we were given and no more.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

Fear is generous and does not exclusively live in the hearts of mortals.

Can you imagine the colonized fighting on behalf of the colonizer to protect the colonizer from being colonized?

The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.

Because broken hearts strip vocabularies down to their raw bones…

Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ?

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

I did not know when humans pray for nature, they pray for something to control.

Sometimes it’s better to be happy than right.

But you know what's worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you're not even alive to feel it.

It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul, especially if you don’t want to leave any evidence of foul play.

Mika builds strong relationships with all the members of Nowhere House while working with the three young witches to teach them to control their powers. When this unique family finds themselves in potential trouble, Mika must choose between following the carefully prescribed rules or following her heart.

As the last (barely) surviving member of his household, Robin knows he’s hallucinating when a white man hands him a silver bar that heals him. Under the guardianship of Professor Lovell, Robin is tutored and educated until it’s time for him to begin studying at the prestigious Oxford University. When Robin uncovers a plot for the British to go to war with China, he, and his cohorts, must decide if their allegiances lie with the Crown or with a homeland they never truly knew.

Following the events in Shanghai with Juliette and Roma, Rosalind Lang is now working for the Nationalists as an assassin fighting both Communists and Imperial Japan. When her new assignment finds her playing house with another agent, Rosalind must find a way to do her job and keep her walls up to protect both national and personal secrets.

My bookish friends, Noah and Leslie, decided to compete for "Best Book" each month. This month, Noah and Leslie submitted “Non-fiction by BIPOC author” for July.