In 1969, the polluted Cuyahoga River burned, attracting negative national media attention. Then, only three fish species were found to be living in those contaminated waters. Now, in 2026, 77 fish species are thriving. Otter, beaver, and blue heron have also returned to the river’s banks. And people, too, are benefiting from the cleaner waters, enjoying water sports like canoeing, kayaking, and paddling.

In this penultimate volume of The Complete Funky Winkerbean, creator Tom Batiuk gives unique insight into his creative process and explains why he made the difficult decision to end the strip after 50 years. But even with the strip’s conclusion in sight, Batiuk still takes risks, including introducing dramatic new storylines.

It’s far too easy to allow the national media and disparaging fans to undermine Clevelanders’ views of their professional sports teams. While the Browns, Guardians, and Cavaliers have certainly caused more than their fair share of frustration and heartbreak, there are countless moments of glory in the fertile athletic history of Northeast Ohio that receive little notice east of Shaker Heights or west of Rocky River. Jonathan Knight’s Classic Cleveland Series sets out to combat this trend, bundling together the most memorable moments of Cleveland’s beloved athletic clubs. In three separate publications, Knight ranks the fifty greatest games in each franchise with entertaining accounts of each contest, properly placing them in the broad landscape of civic history. This updated edition covers the team’s name change and more recent memorable games.

It began with a simple question: was Ernest Hemingway a “car guy”? For journalist Mark Burrell, this initial curiosity turned into a decades long quest to learn more about Hemingway by finding the people who knew him best in Italy, Cuba, and Key West. With every interview and meeting, more questions arose. Was an old boat at Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, the real Pilar or a replica? Were Hemingway’s furniture, art, and 9,000-book library still inside the Finca? How did Cubans feel about the American writer, and what role did he have in his community there? Was Hemingway’s son, Patrick, right that losing his hilltop villa after 20 years was the “last straw” that led to his father’s suicide?

The Conscience of a City and a Nation is the first comprehensive biography of Paul Block Jr., son of a publishing giant who owned newspapers across the United States. Block was passionate about studying chemistry, which he studied at Columbia and Yale. However, following his father’s death, he stepped in to help run papers the Blocks owned in Pittsburgh and Toledo. Eventually, Block and his family relocated to Toledo, one of Ohio’s up-and-coming cities.

Set against the backdrop of rural Ohio, Just Some Girl lyrically unpacks what it means to become a woman. While the author is initially nurtured by loving parents and strong sibling bonds, adolescence finds Schwanke lacking a sense of identity and feeling deeply insecure, like so many other teenage girls. To cope, she simultaneously reaches toward—and eventually fights against—disordered eating, alcohol abuse, painful relationships with men, and self-sabotage.

Grounded in deep concern about the climate crisis, Carolyn Williams-Noren’s Oil Courses recalls a family reliant on the oil industry—her father worked for British Petroleum in Anchorage, Alaska—and a summer spent in its service on Endicott Island. What “curriculum” has oil offered each of us? To answer, Oil Courses turns to strange happenings in the changing landscape and in our interior lives, magnifying odd scenes that once seemed ordinary and filing them under the names of school subjects such as physics, economics, and history.