Kyle E. Miller's The Idiot’s Garden thrusts you immediately into the reality that Bike, Peloria, Seed, and Nameless inhabit. In this futuristic, climate-fiction (cli-fi) novel, the oceans have boiled, whales consume power lines, and the people and creatures possess abilities beyond our present-day human world.

The Idiot’s Garden is not one thing: It's a postapocalyptic novel, poetry, and short stories. The exact category may not be the important thing, though. The language will draw you in with the riddle-like turns of phrases. “It was terrifying to be born a thing that could change its mind,” concludes the first unnamed chapter.

The characters come together by necessity. Events happen that this group does not fully understand, yet they keep finding ways forward. At the beginning of the book, Seed’s recovery from his all-consuming illness seems miraculous and is explained by the six-fingered Peloria having fed him a fish:

Have you ever felt a kinship with someone you have never even met?

Clare Kinberg, publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News, never crossed paths with her estranged Aunt Rose when she was alive, but Kinberg learned about all the connections and similarities the two had through her investigation into Rose’s life. Kinberg tells their intertwining stories in her new book, By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family.

By the Waters of Paradise, though nonfiction, reads like a slowly unfolding mystery as Kinberg puts together clues about her aunt’s life. Kinberg also examines the broader context of the times in which she and Rose have lived. One throughline is traced from the racial tensions in St. Louis, where both of them are from, to across the country in the 20th century, from violence to racial covenants in deeds. Racism and antisemitism—even within their own family—have troubled both of their lives. Kinberg offers reflections on how distressing racist and antisemitic beliefs and actions were and are.

Both Rose and Kinberg entered interracial relationships—another throughline. Kinberg looks at how her own life parallels Rose’s, and at her own identity as she formed an interracial, queer family. Their chosen families influenced where each of them built their lives—coincidentally, both in Michigan at different points in time.

This interview originally ran on October 27, 2025. We're rerunning it because Yun is doing her only book-release event for "And the River Drags Her Down" in Ann Arbor at Booksweet on Saturday, January 3, 2026, at 5 pm. (Date was moved from Thursday, December 18, 2025.) 

Loneliness and responsibility devastate the older sister, Mirae. Grief and a magical power motivate the younger sister, Soojin. The combination is nothing less than miraculous and destructive.

And the River Drags Her Down, the new young adult horror novel by Ann Arbor's Jihyun Yun, retells a Korean folktale in a fictional coastal resort town called Jade Acre. Water and all its possibilities will never seem the same after reading it.

The Han sisters possess a unique gift. They can bring back dead creatures by following a protocol with the body. The girls discover their powers early on by mistake, and their mother guides them. Later, one of them deliberately and against advice uses her ability for her own objective.

When Mirae drowns unexpectedly after their mother had already also died suddenly, Soojin is bereft. The loss of her sister is compounded by the loss of her mother, so that Soojin “felt wounded by everything beautiful her sister was not alive to see.” In an attempt to seem fine, Soojin makes up stories about having lots of friends for her father, whom she thinks falls for it, but does not believe her for a second.

Throughout it all, “Soojin was sovereign of the nation of never letting go.” She misses her sister too much to see clearly. Her subsequent actions illustrate what her friend Mark Moon’s mother says: “Not letting go is the only prerequisite of a haunting. Our harms never leave us if we don’t let them leave.”

So Soojin does not stop to question whether she should when she has the chance to bring Mirae back to life. The small physical remnant of her sister that Soojin finds quickly grows into a revenant form of Mirae. This Mirae returns with perfect skin, does not seem to bleed with real blood, and unbeknownst to Soojin, gains powers with water. All those warning signs are invisible to the ecstatic Soojin, who feels entirely thrilled to have her sister back. During a belated celebration of Mirae’s 18th birthday, the sisters are “euphoric and drunk on the fact of being alive.”

The issues start piling up and cannot be ignored, though. Mark notices first. At that same impromptu birthday party with the two sisters, he already sees cracks in the perfect front:

No bar is too low for Cammy to shimmy under during the week after her father’s unexpected death. The open question is whether the almost-30 millennial will get it together by the end of Cammy Sitting Shiva, the first novel by Ann Arbor playwright Cary Gitter.

The book follows Cammy’s antics from Queens to River Hill, New Jersey, to a side trip in Atlantic City. Each of her efforts to feel better—or evade her problems—creates new ones. Plus, Cammy had problems before this week because her career as an aspiring writer is far from successful.

From further eroding the trust of her mother to alienating her best friend who tries to help, Cammy tries anything but grieving and comforting her loved ones.

Gitter, whose novel was published in August, will share about his book on a local authors panel along with Clare Kinberg, Henry Hank Greenspan, Jack Zaientz, and Barbara Stark-Nemon. The authors will speak at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Ann Arbor on Thursday, November 20, at 5:30 pm.

Gitter infuses the pages with dramatic language. When Cammy runs into her maybe-not-so-former high school crush, she even imagines herself as a film star:

This story originally ran on August 12, 2025. We are rerunning it to promote Beer's appearance at the Ann Arbor District Library's Downtown location on Thursday, November 13, at 6 pm.

You likely have heard of Alexander Hamilton, but do you know his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church?

Angelica led a wide-ranging social life, born in the United States in 1756 and spending time as an adult in England and France before returning to the U.S. In fact, a town in New York bears her name.

U-M lecturer Molly Beer wrote her new, eponymous biography, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution, as an account of Angelica’s “web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States,” according to the book jacket.

That web contained many recognizable—and male, owing to the times—names. First, there was Angelica’s father, Philip Schuyler, who was a Revolutionary War general. Alexander Hamilton married her sister, Elizabeth. The General and first U.S. President George Washington, the third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin, among others, were in her orbit, too.

Yet, Angelica also counted many influential female friends who were involved in the revolutionary process, in addition to her sisters. The book contains stories about these active women: Lucy Knox, Catherine Greene, Janet Montgomery, Mary Byrd, Sarah Jay (and Abbe), Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and even royalists—Lady Mary Johnson, the Haudenosaunee diplomat Molly Brant, and Baroness Riedesel. Her contacts in Europe included Maria Cosway and Marguerite de Corny, among others.

In reflecting on Angelica’s relationships and approaches, Beer writes:

The fear before, during, and after immigration raids distresses both the immigrants who are directly affected and the networks of people who provide support to immigrants.

That is why it is a matter of public health and why William D. Lopez, a public health professor at the University of Michigan, studies immigration.

“The net of deportation pulls in so many more people who didn’t expect to find themselves pulled into the mass deportation campaign or machine,” Lopez told Pulp.

Lopez has now written two books on the topic of immigration. His first book, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, focuses on one raid by ICE, SWAT, and local police in Washtenaw County and what happened afterward. In Lopez’s words, “That book was not so much on the people who were deported but on the families who are left behind and, by extension, the communities in which those families live.”

Lopez’s latest book, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, was published in September and is broader in scope, with stories of six worksite raids in 2018. However, according to Lopez, little is known about such raids, an issue that drives Lopez’s research.

“When things are not defined, they’re harder to study, understand, and resist or oppose,” he said. “We describe our work as research advocacy.”

Octaves by Tyler Dunston moves through a world where “As always / uncertainty is ours.” 

These poems bring in earthly realities like death and the dullness of the noon hour while also reaching more broadly to the skies in which “the moon and stars wilted / through layers of floor-to-ceiling glass.” The realms collide or overlap. A tangible structure interacts with the sun when “I looked outside / at a slab of brick buttered with light.”

The poet’s perspective is clear in the appearances of the first person “I” across the poems, as the poem called “On W.G. Sebald’s natural history of the herring” declares that “I always thought death was ashen gray.” First person plural expands the outlook to involve the reader through meditating “On emptiness” with the lines, “We understand the weight of ladled things, / time maybe most of all, easy to waste / and hard to throw away.”

In Dunston’s poems, his visual art background shows through because the poet is never only fixed on his own experience but rather takes in the full scene and notices the details. The whole time, “I’m feeling my way / in the dark toward you, the sea in my ear.”

Dunston is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He previously earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University. Octaves was also a finalist for the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest, and as the title suggests, many of the poems contain eight lines. 

Fellow poet Jason Barry joins Dunston in conversation to celebrate the release of Octaves at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:30 pm.

Dunston and I spoke about Octaves, visual art, his PhD studies, what he's reading, and what he's working on next.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska makes connections across the experiences of and influences on James Baldwin in her wide-ranging book James Baldwin: The Life Album. Unlike her earlier two monographs on Baldwin, this unique and deeply researched biography is written for a general audience.

However, Zaborowska did not write James Baldwin: The Life Album as a standard biography but rather modeled it after a double vinyl record with four sides (i.e., sections), each with its own tracks (i.e., chapters). The table of contents serves as a track list. Zaborowska elaborates on this creative approach in her book’s introduction:

His critics’ desire that Baldwin straighten out is among the reasons why in James Baldwin I tell his life story in a deliberately unstraightforward, even queer, manner. To honor who he was, and how he viewed and wrote about himself, I revisit his life both chronologically and achronologically, and at times by mixing the two approaches. A brilliant stylist of the English language, Baldwin leaned on repetition and revolution, even re-evolution, of themes, phrases, and points of view, some of which were inspired by Black English and music. Exploding traditional syntax, style, and genre expectations, his long sentences remixed ideas, characters, events, and locations, embracing what he called “the beat.” Fascinated with how experience and emotion drove embodied imagination, will, and speech, he channeled their restless dance into his works, syncopating dates, locations, and personae, repeating riffs and refrains like a virtuoso improviser.

The biography’s structure as an album lends itself well to telling Baldwin’s life story and reflects the very way Baldwin himself approached his work.

Stacks of fabric. Spoiled food. Personal care items covering every surface of the sink and shower. Mold overtaking a bathroom. Unfinished projects. A collapsed garage full of things. Unmaintained yard.

Welcome to the childhood and houses of the Longs, Amanda Uhle’s family, which she writes about in her new memoir, Destroy This House.

Uhle will celebrate the release of her book and be joined in conversation by Davy Rothbart on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:30 pm at AADL Downtown.

The exploits of Uhle’s parents, Stephen and Sandra Long, sound incredible. Uhle distanced herself when she left for college—and even before then. Yet, what is clear in the memoir is that the family ties were strong, at times humorous, and at other times painful.

The stories in Dylan Strzynski’s new book-like zine, Guadalcanal 2006, notice oddities and make up stories about them.

What if an old car was eulogized like a human?

Would the last man alive eat cockroaches?

Why does that person have lunch alone in their car every day?

Are lizards the squirrels of Florida?

What if a painting of Guadalcanal took on a life of its own? How does Guadalcanal live on in the psyche? What if plane travelers were transferred to a submarine en route to Guadalcanal?  

A mix of fiction and nonfiction, these 26 stories of varying lengths do not provide answers to all the questions but rather observe and, in some cases, expand on what is possible. This approach aligns with how Strzynski describes his visual art.

“I’m always using my artwork as a way to tell people about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen,” he said. “Even if it’s funny and weird, it’s usually referencing something I experienced. … Rather than try to solve every problem within everything I make, I recognize everything is of a piece.”

Dexter-based Strzynski is not only a writer but also a visual artist and musician. Yet, his writing has not been featured until now.

“Writing has always been a part of my life, but I kept it a secret,” he said.