New Books Spring 2024

Neon Kiss (Twelve Winters Press) is the latest novel in the Hayden Fuller Mystery Series by L&L English Professor Grant Tracey. It's Remembrance Day, 1965, and Hayden Fuller is named the game’s third star. But the celebration is short-lived as he learns of his father’s murder. With less than three days to solve the crime before returning to the Habs for a home-and-home series against Detroit, Fuller tumbles into the clutches of a cult, the Peoples Way to Christ and their forthcoming Black Mass, the Whiftields, a Rosedale family who made their money in munitions, home security systems, and corruption, and the Defeatniks, a group of University of Toronto students who live their lives on the edges, and seek to “dismantle the universe.” While searching for the brains behind this dismantling Fuller also undergoes a personal journey, one of betrayal, darkness, and ultimately forgiveness. The Collector’s Edition of Neon Kiss includes the author’s introduction “Crime Noir and the Poetics of Uncertainty.” 

Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House (NYU Press) is a comprehensive study of an important settlement house by L&L Emerita TESOL Professor Joyce Milambiling. Settlement house workers helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars. Many of these houses still exist in the original neighborhoods where they confront the problems of today and advocate for their communities. Christodora House, founded in 1897 as “The Young Women’s Settlement,” played an important role in the life of immigrants and other residents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For over 50 years, residents and volunteers at Christodora House provided classes, clubs, recreational activities, and medical and dental clinics for thousands of New Yorkers, and then continued to operate programs out of public housing and other locations for more than two decades.

Late Epistle (Headmistress Press) is the 2022 Sappho Prize in Poetry winning collection by L&L Emerita English Professor Anne Myles. In meticulously-crafted and deeply-felt poems that range from fixed forms to free verse to prose poetry, Late Epistle comes to terms with a life’s journey. The speaker considers the familial and personal history that shaped and the “unspeakables” that silenced her poetic voice, while standing wondering on the verge of an uncertain future.