I first became aware that I was losing my eyesight when I was in Nicaragua, helping to celebrate the Sandinistas.

Inspired by literary journalism made famous by Capote’s In Cold Blood, this award-winning book project is entitled “Little Murderers: Character Studies of Ten Children That Kill”. 

Unsung heroes have become a common theme for African-American literature and movies in the modern age. The Help, Hidden Figures and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks focus on the black struggle and unsung women who helped changed the world.

When I was thirteen years old, I hated Emily Dickinson. A great English teacher named Neil Selden introduced me to two of her poems: "I'm nobody. Who are you?" and "Hope is the thing with feathers."

Gaitskill’s writing is surprisingly tender but always on point and never misses a beat.

Luciann Berrios' debut collection bursts out from "under the shadow of a memory," offering not simply poems but chronicles of movement, forward and backward in time.

April Fools Day// 7-9 //Howl! Happening

Sarah Van Gelder reminds me of myself when she starts her book, The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From A 12,000 Mile Journey Through A New America.

Swing Time, the fifth novel from Zadie Smith, is a novel about little girls and the women they become; it’s about racial and class divides, but more importantly, friendship. Smith tackles big, complicated themes in this work

Like that other Bible, the Holy one, if you suspend your disbelief (in the banality of modern art) you can open this book to any page and find inspiration. As for being ‘Outlaw,’ now that our elites are illiterate, how long before ‘outlaw book’ is a redundancy?

In order to gain a sense of order and existential clarity, people often look for comfort and certainty by putting themselves in exotic or geographical distances. Traveling, for example, is one of those activities that cultivates and educates, and it seems that everyone wants to do it. 

It seems that the real story of the modern and contemporary culture (arts and letters) in Iran starts somewhere in the second decade of the 20th century, more precisely in 1925 when Reza Khan took over the royal throne from the ancient Ahmad Shah of the Qadjar dynasty.

ome of the funniest moments in Jade Chang’s first novel, The Wangs vs. the World, are the offhand ones, such as when the Chinese-American family named in the title realizes they don’t know the name of the woman who raised most of them.

Eileen Myles’s 2016 collection of new and selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice is an

absolute must-read—and no, it’s not just for fans of her work, but for poetry lovers everywhere.

Kevin Jack McEnroe’s 2015 novel, Our Town, is an impressive debut; it is beautifully written and heartfelt. It is also a page-turner, but not at all a potboiler. There is tremendous substance and heart underneath the beautiful prose

Originally published in 1998, Katherine Arnoldi’s The Amazing “True” Story of a Teenage Single Mom is packaged and blurbed in a manner that reflects the “Wham! Pow! Comics Aren’t For Kids Anymore” narrative that still afflicted comics at the time. 

This book is a fine read.  What one mighthave thought would have been a trip through real estate jargon or the behemoth ego of a self made bazillionaire and highly auccesful multi-tasker, is instead a captivating and at times emotionally wrenching journey through the diverse interests of an extraordinary life.

Madeleine Thien’s epic third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, set in 2016, is framed by the search for a missing person, Ai-ming, a young woman who came from China to stay with the Chinese-Canadian narrator, Marie, and her mother in Vancouver in 1990, when Marie was eleven years old.

A primary interest of Francis Greenburger is OMI, the 180 acre sculpture park and international art center in Columbia County, NY. I live nearby and attend many wonderful events there.

Wendy Brown is a political science professor at University of California Berkeley, a school whose name conjures memories of the Free Speech movement of the 60s.