Through a powerful combination of prose, poetry, and visual art, The Benefits of Eating White Folks explores an enslaved woman’s determination to survive and persist amid a series of traumas that threaten to break her. And it connects her trials to issues of racial injustice that continue to afflict our country. The result is an unforgettable book, one that holds an unforgiving mirror up to American racism, past and present, showing its ineradicable toll.

Spanning three generations and the interconnected lives of multiple characters, The Door-Man is an inventive and revelatory novel. At the heart of it are two possibly unbridgeable gaps: between the central character’s fragmented understanding of his family’s history and the truth, and between an ancestral cycle of tragedy and a potentially hopeful future.

Imagine that you gain access to a device that allows you to revisit, via video, every moment of your life, good and bad, transformative and mundane. A device that allows you to return to past experiences with living or dead loved ones: both treasured encounters and those so painful it might be best to erase them from your mind. Would such technology be a gift or something more damaging than rewarding?

This question lies at the heart of Michael Paul Kozlowsky’s engrossing and inventive novel, in which the main character, Sean Whittlesea, wins such a device in an unsettling corporate competition. (More on that soon.) The technology brings Sean back to some of his happiest moments, such as when he met his beloved wife, Gwen. But it also draws him closer to darker moments, the worst of these being Gwen’s murder, which he witnessed but forgot: seemingly the result of retrograde amnesia, due to a blow to the head he received during the incident. Understandably, Sean dreads returning to the scene of the crime, even though this promises to reveal exactly what happened, and who was responsible for Gwen’s death.

This haunting young-adult novel weaves together two mysteries: an engrossing whodunnit and also the enigma posed by the young woman who could play a role in solving it: Maggie Warshauer, a budding scientist and keen observer of the natural world.

Maggie lives on a cramped and run-down houseboat with her father, Drew, who manages the marina where the boat is docked. Although Drew clearly loves Maggie, his struggles with alcoholism leave him unable to be fully present for her. So does his inability to let go of his relationship with his ex-wife (“my so-called mother,” in Maggie’s words). He writes to her regularly, begging her to come back to him and Maggie. But without fail, the ex returns the letters to him, apparently unread. Drew’s limitations as a parent push Maggie into the role of caring for herself, and often, for him as well.

This unsettling and absorbing play considers the dark powers of language—how it can be used as a tool of suppression and othering—and what freedom from linguistic rules and strictures, and perhaps from language itself, might make possible. The exploration of these powers and possibilities is both chilling and revelatory.

The play is set at the eponymous Kinderkrakenhaus, a hospital for children, “in an unknown time and unknown geography.” The newest patient, Gnome, has no idea why they’ve been hospitalized, although a more apt description might be imprisoned. Gnome and the other children are trapped within the grey walls of the institution, under the watch of a Dr. Dorothy Schmetterling, who is more interested in enforcing rules among the children than in offering them anything resembling care.

Although we’re long past the Victorian era, motherhood is still romanticized and idealized in much of the popular culture, and the myth that it’s a “sweet vocation,” and never anything more fraught or complicated, has persisted to a frustrating degree. Michelle Ross’s unflinching and unsparing new book offers a welcome corrective to this myth, tearing it apart and devouring it, story by perceptive story. The honesty of the tales is as refreshing as it is unsettling.