Date: January 20, 2021
Before Covid hit, my family often traveled to Germany. There, we found “Asian” restaurants in many small German towns. I had to chuckle at the generalization. Did these restaurants serve […]
Date: January 20, 2021
The Sarton Awards are presented in four categories (memoir, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, nonfiction). The award program is named in honor of May Sarton, who is remembered for her outstanding contributions […]
Date: January 20, 2021
Every time the Animal Control van crept down my block, I’d pray that it wouldn’t stop at my house. As a childless widow with four dogs, I’d become the neighbourhood […]
Date: January 13, 2021
On a damp afternoon a few years ago, descending a stone ramp adjacent to a cobblestone lane, I slipped on a slick patch. Landing on my seat, I bounced upward […]
Date: January 13, 2021
“As a journalist, I’d always been interested in finding that space between what people say and what they do. That’s the way we use rhetoric to hold politicians accountable… As […]
Date: January 12, 2021
O, the Oprah Magazine, features the Rebel Women’s Lit Caribbean Reader Awards, including Donna Hemans’s Tea by the Sea, which won the award for Best Fiction!
Date: January 11, 2021
When my daughter got into Berenstain bears, it was all my fault. I remembered loving the series, associating them with my old school library and a particular comfort there. So I bought her […]
Date: January 11, 2021
When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband, and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early thirties, they had tens of […]
Date: January 7, 2021
540WMain’s Essential Reading List (Books You Must Read) in 2021 Every year we love sharing the books that inspire our mission and programming. One of the first steps to dismantling […]
Date: January 4, 2021
This was a deeply engaging conversation with author and poet Sebastian Matthews. He survived a terrible head-on collision and wrote a wonderful book called Beyond Repair about his experience. We went into […]
Date: June 3, 2020
1942: Clair and Shep Durant, along with their mute four-year-old son, Ty, wait for evacuation to India before the imminent Japanese invasion of the remote Andaman Islands. Shep, a doctor, […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Bound by ambition and a sense of adventure, Claire and Shep Durant journey to the Andaman Islands, a remote part of colonial India, in 1936. They dive deep into their […]
Date: June 3, 2020
ON THE FRONT COVER of Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy there is a palm-lined cove under a twilight sky. Unspoiled by modernity, this looks like island escapism, with no indication this is a […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Channeling some past classics also skeptical of the colonial enterprise, Glorious Boy stands out from the crowded shelves of World War II literature by immersing the reader in one of the remoter […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing […]
Date: June 3, 2020
A newly released novel, “Her Sister’s Tattoo” by Ellen Meeropol, was brought to my attention and it struck a soft spot I thought was long buried. Like so many of you, as […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Consider the cover image for Deborah A. Lott’s memoir Don’t Go Crazy Without Me (Red Hen Press): a chubby adult male dressed in blue velvet […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Subduction is most of all a story of displacement and dislocation: for Claudia, whose Latina heritage lies over a border and whose sense of family lies beyond the betrayal that […]
Date: June 3, 2020
What happens when the world as you know it changes course? When your seemingly rock-solid life suddenly becomes thin and porous? Such is the case for Claudia, a Latinx anthropologist based […]
Date: June 3, 2020
VERDICT Gorgeously, toughly written, this book dares to be open-ended yet leaves readers with a satisfying sense of how life really unfolds. Cultural clash matters here, but personal differences and […]
