“Night”
NIGHT. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.
In May, 1944, 15-year old Elie Wiesel and his family – his mother, father and three sisters – were ordered from their home in Sighet, Transylvania (the central part of Romania) and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Separated from his mother and sisters, Wiesel and his father managed to stay together for eight months, before his father died in January, 1945. Three months later in April, 1945 the camp was liberated and Elie Wiesel began the journey of “one who has emerged from the Kingdom of Night…” Read more 
“Glow”
It is October 31. Halloween. I have long lost my love of masks and phantoms.
So says, 26-year old Amelia “Mia” J. McGee, a woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and a writer for the NAACP and WEB in Washington, DC who has returned to Hopewell County, Georgia to find her missing 11-year old daughter, E.F. “Ella” McGee. Three days prior a rock had been thrown through the McGee’s window with a note that said “The next one won’t be a rock.” Fearing for her daughter’s life, Mia put Ella on a bus to Georgia and arranges for her brother, Buddy to pick up the child at the bus station. But when Ella doesn’t make it, Mia decides to vacate her plans to march in the largest picket in Washington, D.C.’s history on October 31, 1941 and return to her childhood home to find the little girl she named after Elizabeth Freeman, “the great suffragist and speaker.” Read more
“That Old Cape Magic”
A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
58-year old, Jack Griffin is a grumpy former screenwriter turned college professor who “has been trying for a long time to understand and resolve his almost pathological resentment towards his deceased parents.” The only child of two Ivy-League educated parents who spent their lives teaching at a college in the “mid-fucking-west,” Griffin has spent his entire life trying to get away from his parents to no avail. They occupy his thought process and influence his opinions even though they’ve been reduced to ashes in urns stored in the trunk of his car. Read more
“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
Once upon a time, there was a happy family – a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, …..and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austin Book Club recently had her sixth novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves published – a book so full of surprises that writing a book review is difficult and challenging without giving away details that shouldn’t be told. Suffice to say, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a powerful story that will break your heart but also make you smile for the ending is so amazing, so touching, and so perfect that tears will come to your eyes. Read more
“Eleanor and Park”
He loved how much they loved each other. It was the thing he thought about when he woke up scared in the middle of the night. Not that they loved him – they were his parents, they had to love him. That they loved each other. They didn’t have to do that.
16-year old Parker “Park” Sheridan lives in a suburb outside Omaha, Nebraska with his parents and younger brother, Josh. Next door are his paternal grandparents (his maternal grandparents live in Korea where his mother is from). A tight-knit family, the Sheridans “were practically the Waltons” although Park feels somewhat disconnected from the love fest his parents share between themselves. Read more
“Tenth of December”
George Saunders is a master short story-teller whose talent is skillfully displayed in The Tenth of December, a collection of ten short stories that was recently published (2013). A writer who seems to be writing about the mundane aspects of life – work, buying a puppy, planning a birthday party, or picking the kids up from school – Saunders is, in fact writing about the big picture: parenting, corporate greed and power, entitlement, human rights, mental illness, and despair. With George Saunders, there is always a message that says something about our culture and what we value and that’s what makes his short stories so thought-provoking, hilarious, and often heart-breaking. Read more
“The Whore’s Child”
Readers often ask me who my favorite writers are and although the question is tantamount to asking what my favorite foods are (there are many; where should I start?), I usually answer “Jonathan Franzan, John Irving, and Richard Russo” because the trio represents an elite group of writers whose prose never fails to keep my interest. Each author has his own writing style but they all share the traits of great writers – sentence fluency, character depth, memorable word choice, and an interesting story to tell. Read more
“Into the Wild”
…a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured, isn’t a challenge at all.
In September, 1992 a young man’s decomposing body was found in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness by a group of hunters. The young man was Christopher “Chris” McCandless (who was also known as Alex Supertramp, a trail name he bestowed upon himself), a 24-year old adventurer who had spent the past four months of his life hunting and foraging in an interior part of Alaska known as the Stampede Trail. When the world learned McCandless was from a well-to-do family in Virginia and an honors graduate of Emory University, people were confounded and perplexed as to what would cause a prosperous, young, well-educated and smart man to lead a nomadic life that would ultimately lead to his untimely death. Read more
Five Chimneys
We lived to resist and we resisted to live.
Five Chimneys was written in 1947 by Olga Lengyel, a 38-year old survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau who wrote the book as a memoir; a personal account of the year she spent in a concentration camp. In 1944, Olga was living in a small city in Transylvania (which was part of Hungary at the time) with her husband, Miklos Lengyel, a surgeon, their two sons, Arvad (11) and Thomas (9), and her parents when they were told they were being deported to Germany. Read more
“American Pastoral”
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, American Pastoral by Philip Roth is a thought-provoking novel about post World War II life in America and specifically, how Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and racial cultural norms interplay when forced together. Told from the perspective of Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman, a 62-year old writer who goes back to Newark, New Jersey for his 45th high school reunion in 1995, only to discover his childhood hero – Seymour “Swede” Levov and the older brother of a classmate – has just died at age 70 of prostate cancer that had metastasized. Having just seen the still “splendid-looking” Swede a few months prior at a restaurant in New York City where they had dinner together, Skip decides to write the life story of the Jewish kid from Newark who seemed to live the American Pastoral. Read more
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