Fresh out of college, Marina follows her girlfriend to rural Shika, Japan, to teach English for a year. But challenges arise as she navigates a host of cultural differences and soon finds that it is difficult to discard anything there. Literally.

Nothing happens in Molly Fox's Birthday. The plot is entirely uneventful, charting a day in the life of the narrator, a celebrated playwright, who is staying in Dublin at the home of her best friend, the Molly Fox of the title.

This deeply personal story of feminist activist and political leader Ayaan Hirsi Ali is part family history and part thesis on the impact of Islam on women. The result is a must-read memoir more enlightening than many books assigned in liberal-arts classes.

In Still Life, Melissa Milgrom peels back the skin on contemporary taxidermy, revealing all the blood and guts of a hobby focused on making the dead appear alive.

There's lots to love in the latest gleeful offering from the pen of BUSTs genius cartoonist-in-residence Esther Pearl Watson. Purportedly based on a real teenager's 1989 diary found in a Las Vegas truck-stop restroom, Watson's comic strip, Unlovable, narrates the exploits of hapless high-schooler Tammy Pierce as she navigates the glories and humiliations of small-town adolescence with unbeatably clueless bravado.