Jon Pineda’s new novel has a vaguely apocalyptic feel, but the only apocalypse is a personal one for sixteen-year-old Pearl, as she comes of age while navigating a completely male world and its undercurrents of violence.
Food choices, she argues, are not just an animal rights question, but one embodying environmental, labor, and fair trade concerns.
Most of the stories in The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, Chauna Craig’s debut collection, are set in the American West, centered on characters who often identify closely with their geography … And while Craig convincingly portrays a range of characters, her work is particularly striking when she writes about the landscape of motherhood and the special vulnerabilities of being a stepmother, themes that she understands as surely as she does her Montana settings.
But although Dam contains intriguing traces of family saga and love story, there is nothing formulaic about this layered novel, an often lyrical elegy to the natural world that raises environmental and feminist questions about boundaries of property and self, the reconciliation of love and principles, and the limits of our ability to protect others.
I was hopeful a few weeks ago, on Halloween weekend, when I drove to Seneca Falls, New York. There, in 1848, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other reformers organized the first Women’s Rights Convention…
A year ago, I first read Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, a compelling memoir about his work as an attorney and a convincing indictment of the injustices of our current legal system. Now, I have the opportunity to accompany death row exoneree Anthony Ray Hinton, who was defended by Stevenson, to a nearby federal prison where he speaks to inmates.
I’m fascinated by writers’ homes and museums, regularly drawn to them, though visiting them I often feel restless, as if something is missing. After all, what do buildings full of photos and objects, dioramas and paintings and film clips and clothing, have to do with great writers or favorite books?
On road trips, I’ve taken to stopping at caves. Cave systems may be the last undiscovered regions on earth, but I go to the tourist ones, the long-since-discovered and heavily trampled ones, the kind that only require a jacket and sneakers, not a hard hat, Coleman Lantern, or rope.
In her miniature portraits of a failed salesman transformed through food, a forgetful elderly woman, a young woman making dinner for a sometime-boyfriend at the same moment that he is dying, Flick examines seduction and heartbreak, the complications of new relationships, the dynamics of long-time ones, love, loss, and devastation.
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