Showing results by narrator "Elena Rey" in All Categories

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

Luciana is the baby of her large Colombian American family. And despite usually being relegated to the sidelines, she now finds herself the voice of reason in the middle of their unexpected crisis. Her older sister, Mari, is away at college and reduced to a mere listening ear on the other end of their many phone calls, so when South Florida residents are ordered to evacuate before a hurricane, it’s up to Luciana to deal with her eccentric grandmother, Abue, who’s refusing to leave. But the storm isn’t the only danger.

The seven houses in these seven stories are empty. Some are devoid of love or life or furniture, of people or the truth or of memories. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child’s first encounter with a dark choice or the fallibility of parents.

Best friends and soul mates since they were kids, Hart Augusto and Ruby Armenta were poised to take on senior year together when Hart tragically drowns in a boating accident. Absolutely shattered, Ruby struggles to move on from the person she knows was her forever love. Hart can’t let go of Ruby either…. Due to some divine intervention, he’s offered a second chance. Only it won’t be as simple as bringing him back to life—instead, Hart’s soul is transferred to the body of local bad boy.

Business is booming at Waggy Pup Tails, Summer's dog-walking and treat-baking business. She has new clients to walk and groom and plenty of orders for her homemade dog cookies. Summer loves working with pets, and she's hoping to go to animal camp with her best friend, Daisy. Daisy has her own business making cat toys, so the girls decide to become partners. If they work together, they might just earn enough money for camp. But the girls have different ideas about how to do things.

A scorned god. A mysterious acolyte. A forgetting drug. A dangerous forest. One girl caught between the freedom she always wanted and a sister she can't bear to leave behind. Under the cover of the Night Forest, will Lucha be able to step into her own power...or will she be consumed by it?

Dancing with Butterflies uses the alternating voices of four very different women whose lives interconnect through a common passion for their Mexican heritage and a dance company called Alegría.

From the moment Audre arrives in rural Pennsylvania, it’s clear she won’t fit in. After all, her nose ring, her horror movie obsession, and her family’s Ouija board collection aren’t likely to endear her to a town convinced there’s a secret Satanic cult conducting rituals in the nearby woods. When the preacher’s daughter and Audre’s crush, Elle, goes missing on Halloween weekend, the town is quick to point fingers in Audre’s direction.

Magdalena Herrera is about to graduate high school, but she already feels like an adult with serious responsibilities: caring for her ailing grandmother; working a part-time job; clandestine makeouts with a girl who has a boyfriend. And then there's her secret, which pulls her into the basement each night, drains her of energy, and leaves her bleeding. A secret that could hurt and even kill if it ever got out—like it did once before.

Over the past five years, Mitra Esfahani has known two constants: her best friend Bea Ortega and The Book—a dogeared moleskin she and Bea have been filling with the stanzas of an epic, never-ending poem since they were 13. For introverted Mitra, The Book is one of the few places she can open herself completely and where she gets to see all sides of brilliant and ebullient Bea. There, they can share everything—Mitra’s complicated feelings about her absent mother, Bea’s heartache over her most recent breakup—nothing too messy or complicated for The Book.

When her father is attacked under mysterious circumstances, 22-year-old Trini Duran must return home to Chavez Ravine, a neighborhood mostly abandoned after the government sent letters to residents demanding that they leave. Only 200 stubborn holdouts remain. While the Mexican American community fights to save their homes, they face a new threat that is even harder to combat than the politicians who want them gone.

There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling, acclaimed, and emerging adoptee authors genuinely and authentically reflect the complexity, breadth, and depth of adoptee experiences.

After a chaotic semester, Guinevere “Nev” Tallow is looking forward to a quiet winter break at Deephaven Academy. But when they discover a strange artifact—a scrimshaw—hidden away deep in the under-basement of the school, they can’t resist the urge to investigate further. This scrimshaw seems to be the skull of the school’s founder, Malachi Haven. Each of the skull’s few remaining teeth is engraved with a tiny image that foretells disaster.

According to many viral videos of their public shouting matches, the Plazas and Ortiz families have a well-known food truck rivalry. Jordan and Cindy have spent all of high school making cheesesteaks and slinging insults at each other across their shared Philadelphia street. But the truth? They’re in love, and it’s all just an act for the tourists. When the fake feud lands them a reality tv show pilot, Jordan and Cindy find themselves having to lie on a much bigger scale.

Olivia loves being the Dungeon Master of her after-school club, creating a world with magic and epic battles with adventure around every corner. She’s always felt at home in her game, but now—with new members and new plotlines—her world has gotten more complicated than ever. It doesn’t help when Olivia’s older sister, Lu, comes home from college and brushes off all Olivia’s hard work, telling her to get real. A seed of doubt is planted, and suddenly the colorful world of her game starts to fade around her. Will Olivia be able to keep everything from changing, or will the party fall apart?

Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.

Dolores Huerta always knew that helping others in her community was important. So when she became a teacher and saw how hard it was for her students from farm families to find enough to eat, she knew there was more she could do. Dolores became a labor rights activist, fighting for better conditions for farm workers. She started unions so that workers would be treated more fairly. And she was also a leader of the women's rights movement.

For July Fielding, nothing has been the same since that summer before senior year. Once, she had Alex, her loyal best friend, the one who always had her back. She had Sydney, who pushed her during every cross-country run, and who sometimes seemed to know July better than she knew herself. And she had Sam. Sam, who told her she was everything and left her breathless with his touch.

Cellphones have become a fact of life, with children as young as eight (yes, eight!) getting their very own “devices.” Such boundless access means our kids are in nearly constant contact with technology that was designed specifically for adults. And they’re doing so without any type of road map. Enter First Phone: the essential audiobook that apprehensive parents can confidently hand to their kids to listen to as they begin their journey into the digital world.

Vampires and merpeople, angels and demons—the stories in this anthology imagine worlds where the only thing more powerful than the supernatural, is love. A girl in a graveyard goes on an unexpected date, a shipwrecked sailor makes a connection on a forbidden island, a piano melody summons a soul mate. Creatures of folktales and legend, of land and sea, of centuries past and life after life, all wrapped into one spellbinding compendium. Once you sink into its story, it’ll never let you go.