Twelve-year-old Gladys Burke may not have many friends, but at least she has her empire. From her table at the back of the cafeteria, Glad arranges favors for her classmates in exchange for their friendship. She solves every problem, handles every situation, and saves every butt. But the jobs keep getting harder, and when Glad decides the problem that most needs fixing is her parents’ relationship, she finds herself in way over her head. She’ll have to call in all her favors and use all her skills to help the person who most needs it—herself.

Eighth-grader Emma Macintyre could use some good luck. The popular kids at her school ignore her, the boy she likes is out of her league, and her best friend has been ditching her for the mean girls. Worst of all, her beloved Aunt Jenny died recently, leaving Emma and her single mom reeling with grief. Then Emma receives a mysterious letter with no return address. The letter promises that ten lucky little things will happen to her over the next thirty days—she just has to make a list of what she wants. When the things on her list start coming true, she races to understand what’s happening. How does this lucky letter work? Who sent it? And what’s going to happen when the thirty days are done? Read Questions for Discussion about Lucky Little Things Read an interview with Janice about Lucky Little Things Check out the real Waggytail Dog Rescue, as featured in Lucky Little Things “With so many different subplots, a wide variety of readers will find this story relatable. The consistent...

MANIPULATIVE. TRAINWRECK. PSYCHO. Elizabeth Madigan needs too much love. As the neglected daughter of a beautiful, selfish mother, she learned early in life how to get attention through lies, but it’s never enough. At age eight, she pretends to have cancer. At age twelve, she lives a thousand lives online. At age seventeen, she’s in inpatient treatment for self-harm, blaming it on trauma from her past. But what exactly is her damage? If she knew, maybe she could stop herself before she gets busted for good. But she’s been lying so long, she’s starting to forget what’s real. And as her passionate need for her girl friends’ attention grows, she’ll do anything to keep them in her life — including risk it. Told in four sections (“Beth,” “Betty,” “Eliza,” and “Elizabeth”), I, LIAR is about the way we rewrite our histories, remake our selves, and revisit the same storylines and characters throughout our lives. It’s about the longing for maternal love, the passionate intensity of female friendships,...

And every week, there was the unspoken question, the one I didn’t know enough to ask myself : Have you found her yet? The one who reminds you of you? Twenty years after she lived at a homeless shelter for teens, Janice Erlbaum went back to volunteer. Now thirty-four years old and a successful writer, she’d changed her life for the better; now she wanted to help someone else–someone like the girl she’d once been. Then she met Sam. A brilliant nineteen-year-old junkie savant, the product of a horrifically abusive home, Sam had been surviving alone on the streets since she was twelve and was now struggling for sobriety against the adverse health effects of long-term drug abuse. Soon Janice found herself caring deeply for Sam, following her through detoxes and psych wards, halfway houses and hospitals, becoming ever more manically driven to save her from the sickness and sadness leftover from Sam’s terrible past. But just as Janice was on the verge of becoming the girl’s legal guardian, she...

At fifteen, sick of her unbearable and increasingly dangerous home life, Janice Erlbaum walked out of her family’s Brooklyn apartment and didn’t look back. From her first frightening night at a shelter, Janice knew she was in over her head. She was beaten up, shaken down, and nearly stabbed by a pregnant girl. But it was still better than living at home. As Janice slipped further into street life, she nevertheless attended high school, harbored crushes, and even played the lead in the spring musical. She also roamed the streets, clubs, bars, and parks of New York City with her two best girlfriends, on the prowl for hard drugs and boys on skateboards. Together they scored coke at Danceteria, smoked angel dust in East Village squats, commiserated over their crazy mothers, and slept with one another’s boyfriends on a regular basis. A wry, mesmerizing portrait of being underprivileged, underage, and underdressed in 1980s New York City, Girlbomb provides an unflinching look at street life,...

(Unpublished, 2022) Last night, I spent five and a half hours watching blackhead extraction videos on YouTube. It does not feel good to admit this, but it felt excellent to do it. I’ve become a craven being. Last month, to thwart myself, I adjusted the settings on my phone so I could only watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day. Now I watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day on my phone, and hours more on my laptop. The first step to solving my problem is to acknowledge it, which is why I’ve put off this reckoning so assiduously. I don’t want to quit watching blackhead extractions. Furthermore, I’ve been ashamed to own up to what I’ve been doing, and I think that’s appropriate. I’m proud to be ashamed. If I’m going to be a disgrace, at least I can loathe myself for it. In order to understand, and thereby to overcome, my maladaptive behavior,[1] I propose to analyze its complex aspects through the lenses of various modalities. Defining the subject of inquiry: Blackhead extraction videos are videos...

I was The Only One You Could Really Talk To. You’re not supposed to be happy to have cancer. You treated it like a triumph. You’d been complaining about your health for years, and sympathy was wearing thin. Co-workers had started rolling their eyes at your excuses. Then you were diagnosed with liver cancer. All those people were wrong to suspect you of exaggerating; they owed you fervent apologies. You were vindicated. The day of your diagnosis, you posted: “Tests came back. Cancer. Shit just got real.” Shit just got real. What a strange phrase for the circumstances. Like a line from a bad action movie; like a challenge, but to whom? It stuck in my head, Shit just got real. Shit wasn’t real before? Your friends threw you a party. Even better: it was a benefit. A party where people came to support you, tell you how important you were, tell you how bereft they’d be without you, and give you money for your expenses. You’d raised a few thousand dollars online, but it wasn’t going to be enough....

I spent most of the toga party in the girls’ bathroom. I kept going in and out to do coke with Nicola, then getting caught up in conversations; after a while it made more sense just to stay. Plus it was a prime observation post: I stood on the lid of the leftmost toilet and watched everything from above like a security camera, omniscient. For some reason, this party was even more debauched and louche than our usual high school parties. Maybe it was because it was in a rented dance studio instead of someone’s house, or because we were all wearing bedsheets, or maybe there was a sale on drugs, but everyone got very fucked up very quickly. I personally was on acid and coke, on top of smoking joints and drinking. I hadn’t planned it that way, it was a fluke of opportunity, but since it happened, I made sure to tell everyone I saw about this bonkers combo platter of drugs I was on, in case anyone had forgotten how hardcore I was. At sixteen and three-fourths, I had so many sexual partners that...

Kumbaya, Motherfucker is a series of social media posts written from January to May of 2017. During this time, I was walking around New York City with the sign pictured above, aggressively singing “Kumbaya” at people who disagreed. Here are the posts in chronological order: Kumbaya, Motherfucker Kumbaya, Class Consciousness Kumbaya, Baby Kumbaya, Briefly Kumbaya, Bitches Kumbaya, Kids Kumbaya, Concerned Friends Kumbaya, King Kumbaya, Springtime Kumbaya, Stoners Kumbaya, Rational People Kumbaya, Brooklyn Kumbaya, George Kumbaya, Kind of a Monotonous Song After a While Kumbaya, Comerades Kumbaya, Dude. Whatever. Kumbaya, For Fuck’s Sake Kumbayeah, Maybe It’s Time to Stop Kumbaya, I’m Still Singing Oh, Lord. Kumbaya.