Manhattan Beach
Seven years ago in 2011, Jennifer Egan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for A Visit From The Goon Squad (Goon Squad) – a novel that wasn’t typical in its structure or story which left readers perplexed because aren’t novels supposed be about momentum and anticipation? Read more 
Less
There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me! And the man is taken after all.
When the book “Less” by Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018, there were generally three camps of people: those who didn’t understand how this book won what many consider the most prestigious annual literary award in the world, those who totally got it, and the rest, myself included who didn’t understand why the book won until they got through most of the book and realized the brilliance is not only the story but also how it was told (note: I didn’t really like the book until I got to the end when the story came together brilliantly). Read more
By Any Greens Necessary
Tracye Lynn McQuirter wrote “By Any Greens Necessary – a revolutionary guide for black women who want to eat great, get healthy, lose weight, and look phat” – after realizing the link between race and nutrition.
McQuirter heard Dick Gregory speak at Amherst College in 1986 about the “plate of black Americans ” (and as the author duly notes, not the “state of black Americans,” and she realized that so much of what we eat is tied to the economical and political factors that influence our choices. Read more
Who is Jeremy Dixon?
You may not have heard of Jeremy Dixon but you will. Dixon, a native New Zealander is the founder of Revive Cafe – restaurants serving delicious, fresh whole grain plant-based food in Auckland, the man behind Cook:30 – the 30 minute television series (www.3abn.org) in which he makes a complete meal using fresh, wholesome plant-based ingredients, and the author of eight cookbooks (The Revive Cookbooks 1-6, and the Cook:30 Cookbooks 1 and 2). The guy is busy (it’s gotta be all that plant-based fuel)! Read more
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
I am here. I need you to see me. I need you to see that I am here. You, world, cannot make me crumble. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.
Clemantine Wamariya was born in 1988 in Rwanda and led an idyllic childhood until 1994, when civil war broke out between the Tutsi and Hutu (the two main groups of people residing in the country). Clemantine, six years old at the time, and her 15-year old sister, Claire were sent to live with their grandmother in the southern region of the country but when the war spread, the two young girls began a 6 year journey migrating through seven South African countries before being granted refugee status in the United States in 2000. Read more
The Wife
Written by Meg Wolitzer, The Wife begins on an airplane, and specifically in seats 3A and 3B where Joe and Joan Castleman are sitting. The couple is on their way to Finland to attend the annual Helsinki Awards dinner where a prestigious literary award will be given to Joe, a distinguished well-respected American writer of fiction who previously won a Pulitzer for one of his books.
Narrated by Joan Castleman, the long-suffering wife who displays impatience for a husband who acts more like a baby than a man, while basking in the attention that goes along with being the wife of a man put on a pedestal, The Wife is the story of a marriage from the point of view of the wife. By the second page of the novel, the reader learns that Joan has finally decided to leave Joe after more than 40 years of marriage, and all the reader can think about is why. Read more
You Think It, I’ll Say It
You realize, don’t you, that you weren’t saying what I thought? You were saying what you thought.
You Think It, I’ll Say It is a collection of ten short stories written by Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (who goes by Curtis Sittenfeld). Published in 2018, You Think It, I’ll Say It is hard to put down because the stories draw the reader in to the turmoil between what appears to be true and what is actually true. Personal perspective, as determined by history and experience, is a key part of each story which only reinforces what we all know but sometimes forget: most of us start out optimistic and naive; life experiences either strengthen us or bring bitterness and disillusionment which means that truth is often subjective. Read more
The Destiny Thief
The Destiny Thief is a collection of essays (9) on writing, writers, and life by Richard Russo. Readers may recognize Russo, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls and also wrote Nobody’s Fool and the follow-up Everybody’s Fool, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Straight Man, The Whore’s Child, and That Old Cape Magic, but for those who have not read his works, the best way to describe Russo’s books is to say they are authentic, real, and so well written. So how did he do it? By living the life he was meant to live. Read more
You Play the Girl
Strategic girls manage perception; idealistic girls go up against the narrative, because it’s at the root of the problem, and they get crushed every time. ~Carina Chocano
When I was a young girl (maybe 12 or 13), I watched my mother get up early one Sunday morning and drive down to Walter’s Bakery (the local bakery known for their doughnuts, brownies, and New York-style streusel coffee cake) to buy a bag of glazed, powdered, and jelly doughnuts. She returned home, bag in hand and put the doughnuts on a plate and promptly delivered them upstairs to my five brothers who were in bed.
The problem with this extremely kind gesture is that it was Mother’s Day – that one day a year when fathers and kids are supposed to wait on mom, instead of the other way around. Even back then as a child I thought it was insane for a mother to bring her five sons fresh doughnuts in bed, especially on Mother’s Day. Where’s the justice? There wasn’t any…and that was the problem with growing up female in most homes in the 50’s, 60’s. and 70’s. Read more
The House on Mango Street
People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth.
In 1984, Sandra Cisneros – a woman who “dreamed about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamed of their weddings” – was a 30-year-old Mexican American writer (having earned a BA in English from Loyola University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa) published her first book, The House on Mango Street: the story of a young Hispanic girl named Esperanza Cordero growing up on the west side of Chicago. Read more
Paddock Post 