Spotlight: Looks Perfect by Jessica Siskin

What comes between a fashion icon’s perfect image and her genuine self? The perfect stranger—in a sharp and witty novel about identity, performance, and what it takes to make a true connection.

One million people follow Stella Lerner’s every move. And now the buzzy fashion designer is fulfilling her lifelong dream and taking her indie clothing brand global with the help of the industry’s biggest investor. Sounds perfect. Except offline, the optics aren’t so great.

Her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex, is crumbling just as the pressure to curate her image online only builds. Feeling trapped between the picture-perfect life she’s promised her followers and the messy reality she’s facing, Stella anonymously joins a new dating app. Blindr promises deep, private conversations, free from the burden of anyone’s expectations, especially her own. That’s when Stella connects with a stranger called Pineapple who’s intuitive, honest, and empathetic. Stella may be watched by millions, but this man, who’s never even laid eyes on her, makes her feel seen.

What starts as a diversion becomes a journey of radical transformation. As Stella’s search for authenticity intensifies, every chat with Pineapple takes her further down a path she never could’ve imagined.

Excerpt

EXCERPT from LOOKS PERFECT by Jessica Siskin, Text copyright © 2026 by Jessica Siskin, Published by Little A

Eight

Before Alex, I didn’t have a boyfriend for almost six years, and it was starting to feel like I never would. When I was a kid, I never really believed I would get married. My Barbie got married to Ken, and Aunt Becky got married to Uncle Jesse, and so did Princess Ariel (after abandoning her entire family, the only world she’d ever known, her lower body, and her literal voice for a guy she’d never even spoken to—but I’ll be the first to admit that Prince Eric turned out to be a catch and probably the second-hottest animated leading man after Dmitri in Anastasia). I knew that I was supposed to believe that getting married and having a family was what was going to happen to me. I had a nursery full of Cabbage Patch babies in my bedroom closet, three heart-shaped Polly Pocket–branded microcosms of domesticity, and a set of Quints dolls, palm-size baby quintuplets that were to be fed in tandem from five tiny, connected bottles, like a shotski. I knew I was meant to think it was inevitable I’d get married and have babies, but I just didn’t buy that I could ever be so lucky. I couldn’t even be satisfied with the stifling narrative I was being sold.

The first time I ever had a real boyfriend (after a beautiful backyard wedding to my neighbor Ricky Shapiro in kindergarten) was senior year of high school. His name was Brett Wertheimer, he was the president of Model Congress and the captain of the tennis team, and the whole time we were together, it felt like a fluke, like the universe had made a mistake by issuing me a relationship and I’d have to do everything in my power to hold on to him, my one and only chance at love in this lifetime.

While most couples in our class were breaking up before leaving for college, I convinced him we should stay together. We’d only be a couple of hours apart, me at NYU and him at UPenn in Philadelphia; an hour and a half on Amtrak barely qualified as long distance.

When he broke up with me roughly six weeks into the first semester of college while visiting over fall break, I literally could not compute what was happening.

“No,” I said, sitting next to him on the twin bed in my dorm room. “I do not consent.”

We’d had our life planned out: We’d move to the suburbs and be cool parents. I’d drive a Range Rover and never be late for school pickup; he’d work in finance in the city. Our kids, a boy and a girl (three years apart), would somehow look just like both of us and share only our good qualities. When he dumped me, the fully formed vision I had for my entire life disintegrated like that raccoon’s cotton candy once dipped in water in that viral video. It still hits way too close to home. I couldn’t understand how someone else could make such a pivotal, defining choice about my life.

He left me crying beneath my poster of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christie Turlington clutching one another in the nude.

“It’s what’s best for both of us,” he managed, and then, “I’m sorry,” as he walked slowly backward out of my room, as if retreating respectfully from the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That’s when I learned that you don’t get to just create your life however you want; you can only do what you can with what’s available to you. I thought I had it all figured out, the car was driving on autopilot, destination: perfection. I just forgot that another person had access to the brakes.

And then came years and years of watching my friends date and get married. Sure, I dated people, but nothing felt meaningful. And everything was fine until, as if overnight, the music stopped in the communal game of musical chairs I didn’t know every Jewish young professional in Manhattan was playing, and everyone started to pair off until there was seemingly no one left. I was out.

Before all their engagements, I had a social life that all of my friends participated in, whether they were dating someone or not. Once everything changed, my coupled friends stopped going out as much, and my social calendar filled up with engagement parties and bridal showers and bachelorette weekends. My attitude around being single changed too—it went from being totally normal, almost the default in our mid-twenties, to feeling kind of sad and pitiable as we all approached thirty and I found myself picking at overcooked salmon at more singles tables than I could count.

Work was going so well, Stellar was blowing up, and I’d created this illusion on my Instagram that I didn’t need anything or anyone, but I was lonely, and the single-girl-in-the-city thing was getting old. So I got on the dating apps, and before long I was getting messages from guys who said they’d shown their matches to their sister or their best girlfriend or their coworker and they’re obsessed with me, which maybe should’ve felt good but made me feel pathetic, like I didn’t belong there. But there was nowhere else to go. After college and those early days in the city when everyone reconvenes, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet someone in real life. I read an article that said that 10 percent of couples meet at work, but I rarely came across straight men in my line of work.

The apps were a nightmare unless you’d never been on one, in which case they seemed like So Much Fun. My friends who were already coupled before apps ruined regular dating thought they were like DoorDash but for someone to eventually adopt a rescue dog and curate a wedding playlist with. But while the delivery service bestows overpriced sushi stuffed like jewels in their neat custom-cardboard boxes from SUGARFISH thirty to forty-five minutes after you press Order, dating apps aren’t built to deliver with efficiency. As a matter of fact, their entire business hinges on keeping people swiping for as long as possible.

And I get why apps seem so appealing to people who’ve never had to use them. I love to shop online. It’s getting easier and easier to find what I need when I need it. Just last week I was wearing my beige Nili Lotan boilersuit when it occurred to me that I’d love one in leopard print for the fall. It took about six minutes of focused googling, combining and replacing search terms like Chef René Redzepi selecting bespoke fungi and obscure seaweeds in his culinary lab in Copenhagen until I finally found something close enough to what I wanted. Though the background of the leopard print was tan and not cream, like I’d envisioned, and the spots were a little less graphic and more realistic than I’d hoped, I managed to cart the last size 2 on Farfetch.

That was the thing about dating: I’d curated my life in such a way that I could access pretty much anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. I summoned vegan bento boxes and chopped salads and kale collagen smoothies on Postmates or Caviar or UberEats, and if I wanted fresh stone crabs from Joe’s in Miami, they’d FedEx them to me on ice, or I could just hop down to South Beach for the weekend. Celeste was over for a contour spray tan whenever I felt less than glowy, and Caleb always squeezed me in for hair color if I felt like I needed a change, even if it was, like, two in the morning before the Michael Kors show and I decided I wanted to show up bleached blond (a mistake, but everyone posting about my hair nightmare pushed me over five hundred thousand, and I was back to my signature auburn by Monday). If I wanted to meet with a brand or I wanted a table at Carbone, Ace could drop my name or call in a favor and make that happen. I was at the point where I could access pretty much anything I wanted by sending a text. So you can imagine how frustrating it was that I couldn’t find someone to love who loved me back.

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About the Author

Jessica Siskin earned her MFA from the New School. She is the founder of Misterkrisp, a  popular Instagram-based food art business specializing in custom Rice Krispies Treats and social  media content. She is the author of Treat Yourself!, a cookbook featuring her inventive food art  and edible creations. Jessica lives in New York City. 

Spotlight: Fugitive Archives My Family and the American Myth of Belonging by Asale Angel-Ajani

Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin, the only Black children in a working-class white family, were shuffled between relatives, coming of age in a country that offered little refuge. Years later, Angel-Ajani dove into the archives, searching for an explanation for her family’s and her country’s contradictions, and for her own unshakeable anger.

What she found were records and stories of her ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, members of the KKK and Black fugitives of a justice system that was rarely just. How could so much love live alongside such hate and prejudice, within the same family? Forged by the violent systems that rewarded racial terror and segregation, Angel-Ajani’s ancestors built their lives together anyway, on the shaky foundation of love and cognitive dissonance.

Fugitive Archives reveals that we are not a country of strangers split into “us” and “them,” who merely need to get to know each other in order to empathize. We have always been deeply entangled. This story of one family’s grief, betrayal, and courage is a vital exploration of race and class, a map for survival and resistance, and a necessary reckoning—for only when we acknowledge the complex, messy truth of who we are as a country, can we shape a more just future.

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About the Author

Asale Angel-Ajani is a writer and anthropologist. She and her twin grew up as the only Black children in a working-class white family. In Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging, she takes up her family's records after her grandmother's death and finds ancestors enslaved and free, Indigenous and white, including Klan members and Black fugitives from the justice system. The book argues that Americans are not strangers split into "us" and "them." We have always been entangled. She is also the author of the novel A Country You Can Leave, a New York Times recommended book and Amazon Editors' Pick, and the nonfiction book Strange Trade. Her work has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in Ms. Magazine. She holds a PhD from Stanford, was a Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard, and has received support from the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations.

Spotlight: Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies by Rachel Wahl

An inside look into real-life conversations across ideological, racial, and institutional lines

What does it take for a progressive student and a conservative peer to view each other with respect? Can trust form between a police officer and a community member after years of tension and mistrust? At a time when political polarization seems insurmountable, Rachel Wahl offers a rare glimpse into what happens when people with opposing views sit down and talk— not with the goal to debate or “prove” their political point but with the goal to understand the life experiences, hopes, fears, and ideas that drive their disagreements. Drawing on in-depth empirical research with college students, police officers, and community members, this groundbreaking book takes readers inside real-life conversations across ideological, racial, and institutional lines.

Wahl draws on political theory to examine two cases: structured dialogue between students and a series of forums held between officers and community members. Rather than idealizing dialogue, Keeping Our Enemies Closer reveals its complexity—where it succeeds, where it falters, and how it can reshape not just minds, but institutions. Through gripping narratives and rigorous analysis, this book challenges assumptions and offers a new framework for thinking about communication in fractured times. An essential read for educators, activists, and policymakers, Keeping Our Enemies Closer has much to offer anyone seeking to understand how connection is forged—or frayed—in twenty-first-century America.

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About the Author

Rachel Wahl is a professor in the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development, a Faculty Fellow at UVA's Karsh Institute of Democracy, and director of its Good Life Political Project. Her work examines how people handle political disagreement in polarized democracies. Her new book, Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies (University of Pennsylvania Press), draws on years of research in settings from police-community forums to college campuses. It asks why political conversation has become so difficult and what dialogue can realistically do for democratic life. She is also the author of Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Spotlight: Silence Was My First Language by Rich Dunning

Pub Date: October 6, 2026

Genre: Memoir

This is the story of what happens when childhood trauma is left unspoken and what becomes possible when silence is finally broken.

Rich Dunning was three years old when his father walked away. Soon after, his mother married Hector, a man whose alcoholism, violence, and cruelty transformed their Bronx basement into a place where fear dictated every decision and survival depended on becoming invisible. Violence became ordinary. Poverty was relentless. Childhood became an exercise in survival. Rich learned to recognize drunken footsteps before a key ever reached the lock. He learned where to hide when the shouting began. At night, he wrapped blankets tightly around his body because rats bit exposed skin while he slept and roaches crawled across the floor and walls. Silence was not a choice. It was survival.

Children raised in violent homes learn to read faces before words are spoken, anticipate danger before it arrives, and disappear before becoming the next target. Those instincts can save a child.

They can also imprison an adult. Long after escaping the Bronx, Rich carried those lessons into every corner of his life. They shaped his relationships, fueled alcoholism, reinforced shame, and convinced him that achievement could bury a past no one else could see. From the outside, he built an extraordinary career. On the inside, he remained the frightened little boy who believed survival meant never letting anyone know the truth.

With extraordinary honesty, Dunning confronts domestic violence, child abuse, abandonment, addiction, homelessness, recovery, forgiveness, and the lifelong psychological impact of growing up in fear. He does not search for villains or offer easy answers. He simply tells the truth, allowing readers to witness both the devastating cost of trauma and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit.

This memoir speaks to survivors of abuse, families affected by addiction, children who grew up too quickly, and anyone who has spent years believing the past could never loosen its grip. It is a story of survival, but more importantly, it is a story of hope. It reminds us that while trauma may shape a life, it does not have to define one. He offers a different kind of courage, not measured by physical endurance, but by the willingness to confront the memories most people spend a lifetime trying to outrun.

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About the Author

Rich Dunning is a senior executive in the medical device industry with more than two decades of experience leading in high-stakes environments; a professional career built on navigating complex systems, managing risk, and operating under sustained pressure. Raised in the Bronx in an environment defined by instability, exposure, and the absence of protection, he developed, from an early age, a level of awareness and control that shaped how he moved through the world. Those conditions did not remain confined to childhood—they inform his approach to leadership, decision-making, and, ultimately, his writing.

He began writing Silence Was My First Language more than 15 years ago, presenting the material as it was lived. Rich has also completed two novels, The Jaguar and Selling Arteries to the Devil, both grounded in real-world experience. He is currently working on additional manuscripts, including The Executive and the Escort and When in Puglia.

Dunning established the The First Language Foundation, a long-term commitment to direct one dollar from every copy sold to organizations supporting children facing abuse, hunger, and homelessness. He maintains dual residence in Lexington, South Carolina (outside of Columbia) and Brickell, Florida, (near Miami).

Connect:

Website: https://www.richdunningbooks.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61572018358103

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richdunningbooks/

Spotlight: Fortune and Glass by John Mutter

Pub Date: October 6, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Literary / Historical
Publisher: Left-Field Publishing

How do you stay human inside a regime built to erase you?

Berlin, 1932. Germany’s fragile democracy is fracturing, its ideals cracking like thin glass as political violence and paranoia seep into the streets. In the midst of this tension, Rudi, a young Foreign Ministry official, meets Sara, an unpredictable, morally fierce Jewish woman whose connection with him is immediate and combustible. By 1943, the Germany they knew has vanished. Rudi works at the center of Nazi power, performing his duties by day and passing intelligence to the Allies by night until Sara’s unexpected return threatens to unravel the life he has carefully constructed to survive.

A debut novel, Fortune and Glass is philosophical spy fiction and a literary love story about private choices, secret resistance, and the cost of staying human inside a system determined to erase individuality. Lyrical, atmospheric, and morally complex, it explores the gray zones of living under authoritarianism and asks a timeless question: Who are you when everything falls apart?

Melding literary fiction, psychological suspense, and historical storytelling, Fortune and Glass is an intimate exploration of identity, conscience, and quiet resistance inside a society sliding into extremism. It explores how ordinary people navigate love, loyalty, and moral responsibility inside systems that reward silence and punish dissent questions that feel as urgent now as they did then. Emotionally rich and philosophically resonant, it turns away from spectacle and heroics to focus on the private cost of survival.

Fortune and Glass is a deeply human story that reimagines the WWII novel by shifting the lens inward toward the moral choices that define us when history fractures beneath our feet. For readers of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, The Book Thief, The Alice Network, and the espionage of John le Carré, this debut novel from an established publishing voice blends intimacy, danger, and moral complexity into a story that feels both timeless and urgent.

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About the Author

John Mutter is a journalist who covers the book world and is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, the online company with publications for booksellers, librarians, and book lovers. He earlier was an editor for more than 20 years at Publishers Weekly. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied for a year in Germany. He has long been interested in history, literature, language, and politics. A resident of various points in the Northeast, including New York City, he now lives in the mountains of New Hampshire with his family. Fortune and Glass is his debut novel.

Connect: https://johnmutterauthor.com/

Spotlight: Cutie Pies by the Slice by Kimberly Nixon

Publication Date: October 6, 2026

Publisher: Roots and Wings Press, LLC

Some people inherit a family. Lila Young has to build one from scratch.

When twenty-year-old Lila arrives in a small Midwestern town, hoping for a fresh start with her older brother, she discovers she’s more alone than ever. Determined to make a life of her own, she opens Cutie Pies by the Slice, where neighbors gather over coffee and strangers slowly become the family she’s always longed for.

As the pie shop flourishes, so does Lila’s confidence. Agnes and Maggie become the sisters she never had, and Vern, a quiet, dependable man who faithfully carries her daily bank deposits, becomes someone she learns to trust.

Then Lila uncovers a devastating secret: without her knowledge, her thriving business has become entangled in organized crime. As hidden loyalties surface and those she loves are drawn into dangerous choices, she must decide whether broken trust can be rebuilt and whether forgiveness is worth the risk.

Set during Prohibition and the Great Depression, Cutie Pies by the Slice is a heartfelt novel of resilience, redemption, and chosen family. Filled with unforgettable characters, small-town charm, and the comforting aroma of fresh-baked pie, it celebrates the quiet courage of ordinary people who discover that the sweetest things in life aren’t inherited, they’re earned.

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About the Author

Kimberly Nixon believes every family has stories worth telling. Drawn to forgotten histories, resilient women, and the ties that bind generations, she writes historical fiction inspired by the remarkable lives of ordinary people. Her award-winning novels, Rock Bottom, Tennessee and Rock Bottom Rising, grew from the true story of her grandmother’s felony conviction in 1925 Tennessee. 

Her children’s book, A Visit from Grandypants, celebrates the joy of family across generations. Kimberly lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, Paul, and is always searching for the next story hidden in her family’s past.

Instagram: @kimberlynixon.author
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