MER Bookshelf – March 2026
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
Date: March 17, 2026
Tucson storyteller Molly McCloy loves telling stories about hard things. She’s done it on stage and in print. Her memoir, “Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on […]
Date: March 17, 2026
Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge, her twelfth volume of poems, will appear in 2026 (Etruscan Press). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers […]
Date: March 12, 2026
During Hurricane Irma in 2017, a 90-foot oak tree split and fell into the middle of Amy Pence’s cottage in the old fishing village of Pine Lake, Georgia. A beam […]
Date: March 11, 2026
It’s finally warming up here in Washington, DC, and earlier this month was the first instance I was able to comfortably sit on our roof and read. With a coffee […]
Date: March 3, 2026
April Ossmann discusses poetry collection, WE with Derate the Hate podcast.
Date: March 3, 2026
Yellow is a slow-bloom speculative novel and quietly cosmic. It’s a book about how long childhood wonders and wounds can linger, how the universe keeps whispering even when we stop […]
Date: March 3, 2026
Molly McCloy discusses her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES: THE SPITEFUL ORIGINS OF THE HAPPIEST DYKE ON EARTH with Hannah Harlee.
Date: March 3, 2026
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence […]
Date: February 24, 2026
This satirical literary thriller has shades of Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. A 19-year-old NYU dropout returns home to Brentwood to laze about and enjoy popping prescription pills. But […]
Date: November 15, 2021
“Wilson has created a panoramic saga of cruelty, injustice, loyalty, and devotion. This is a heartbreaking, loving, moving story told by a sister, daughter, mother, woman who demands and deserves […]
Date: November 9, 2021
“As an adoptee, one of the toughest things is the idea of shifting identities,” writes Jan Beatty in “American Bastard: A Memoir.”” “No one is who they say they are: […]
Date: November 2, 2021
Being an elder millennial (see: I refuse to use the term ‘geriatric’), I’ve come to accept that I no longer know any of the cool lingo that the kids these […]
Date: November 2, 2021
Any baby, let alone a bastard baby, is born a mystery, and babies don’t come with directions. But Jan Beatty’s iconoclastic memoir American Bastard does come with directions. Here is […]
Date: October 20, 2021
The strong, measured, and contemplative voice in Open the Dark, a debut collection of forty-two lyric poems, belongs to poet Marie Tozier (Inupiaq/Puerto Rican.) The book’s release in August 2020, at the […]
Date: October 20, 2021
Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have […]
Date: September 27, 2021
American’s fascination with the mystery and allure of an island that for years they couldn’t access has led them to mythologize Cuba’s history. Those myths of a land stuck in […]
Date: September 22, 2021
In Cai Emmons’ popular novel, WEATHER WOMAN, Bronwyn Artair drops out of her prestigious doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT to take a job as a television meteorologist in […]
Date: September 20, 2021
Peterson (Paper Crown) suffuses this enchanting if opaque collection with references to television and literature. Click here to read more
Date: September 13, 2021
At a writers’ gathering several years ago I had picked up a few basic details of the horrific, head-on, near-fatal automobile crash endured by Sebastian Matthews, his wife, and their […]