This book is not what I expected, but in the best way! It is not quite a traditional mystery, but it is chock-full of suspense and engrossing characters. The Maine Appalachian Trail setting is vivid and comes to feel like a member of the cast. Gaige writes in a way that makes you feel like …
If I loved H Mart before, it took on a whole new meaning with Michelle Zauner’s story. As a bridge child between the old world and the new, Zauner chronicles the struggles with her family as she attempts to find her place in American life. Rife with Korean food, Korean culture, and a difficult love, …
Inside a rented house on bluff in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, I’m one of four women on a DIY writer’s retreat. A wall of tall windows shows a blue scene: a bend in the Mississippi River, cloud cover, deciduous trees, buzzards tilting just beyond our overlook. Inside, having run or walked or stretched to clear our …
Mettlework is available through your favorite independent bookstores.
When I was on tour for my memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, I ended the tour in Atlantic City – a city that I hadn’t returned to since I was a child, accompanying my father while he gambled each day at Caesar’s Palace. In the title chapter, I write about him disappearing into …
My mother sat in the very last row of chairs in the author event space at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, the day my memoir, Ma and Me, was officially released. She smiled with pride as her gaze skipped across the room, surely taking in the improbability of the moment: her daughter, a …
My mother, Mary MacCracken, died before completing her last book, about helping her husband Cal through Alzheimer’s, so I did this for her. She had worked so hard on it, and it was such a good book I felt I just had to finish it and get it published. It was like making a quilt …
Julie Otsuka’s novels are literary gems, and Swimmers joins its predecessors—The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor was Divine—as a work of uncommonly lyrical beauty and pathos. The loss of a public swimming pool to a series of mysterious cracks developing on the bottom disperses a tight and quirky community of lap swimmers. …
TW: Physical abuse, domestic abuse, emotional abuse National Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey has written a brave and telling account of her stepfather’s systematic emotional and physical abuse and murder of her mother, a social worker. Perhaps the most chilling part of the book is the transcript of her stepfather’s last phone call, discovered by the author …
This mesmerizing memoir by poet and translator E. J. Koh explores immigration, motherhood, familial bonds, love, trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation. It takes the reader from San Francisco to Korea to Japan. I found it to be a gorgeous, lyrical, painful, poignant and hopeful read. –Janis Segress, Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, WA Explore language and …
