A funny and penetratingly honest story of three generations of Palestinian women, Zora, Naya, and Arabella, that spans geography, politics, and familial expectations. Family secrets, matchmaking, and ambition bring the granddaughter, Arabella, a New York City theater director, to stage a play in Palestine. Arabella confronts her family’s history along with her grandmother’s and mother’s …
What a treat it was to read Colson Whitehead’s new book Harlem Shuffle. It is the best trip I have taken during the last year. I did not actually “shuffle” around Harlem in the early 1960s, as that would have included using my feet, but I spent time riding on a truck bed, sometimes accompanied …
About a year ago, I read The Dragontail Buttonhole, the first book in a trilogy by Peter Curtis, in which he details his family’s flight from Prague after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. That story read like the best spy fiction of that period of infamy. Peter has followed that story with Cafe Budapest. After an unbelievable trek …
