By the mid-1980s there was an entire subsection of lower Manhattan that had been abandoned by the city. Landlords had neglected their buildings, tenants left, and the underworld took over. It was about this time that a small group of people began to reclaim buildings that were empty and close to demolition. They were known as squatters because they moved in but paid no rent. ... Read More...
Sunday Sentence: The Signature of All Things
Sunday Sentence: The best sentence(s) from this week, out of context and without commentary. Inspired by David Abrams at The Quivering Pen. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living. ... Read More...
Empty Mansions
Throughout American history there have been scintillating stories of “poor little rich girls”—young women who have inherited immense amounts of wealth and yet have not lived happily ever after. There was Doris Duke (tobacco heiress) and Barbara Hutton (Woolworth heiress) whose childhoods and adult lives (including multiple marriages, drug and alcohol problems) were chronicled ... Read More...
The Color Master
Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is one of my favorite books. Her combination of magical and realism makes for poetic, moving reading. Last month her newest book of short stories, The Color Master, came out, and it shimmers with its ability to be both fantastical and utterly human. In “The Doctor and the Rabbi” Bender takes what sounds like the opening ... Read More...
Mrs. Poe
Mrs. Poe is author Lynn Cullen’s fictional look at the relationship between American poet Frances Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe, told from Osgood’s point of view. The novel opens in Manhattan with Osgood trying to sell some of her poetry, as her portrait painter husband has abandoned her and their two daughters for a wealthy divorcée. Despite her husband’s disappearance (which ... Read More...
Mother Mother
Koren Zailckas doesn’t waste any time. In her first novel Mother, Mother: A Novel she takes no more than one hundred pages to pull the mask off Josephine Hurst, a woman who believes she is the pinnacle of modern motherhood—raising two lovely daughters (one destined for Broadway) and a son so gifted she has to home school him. Whether this is true or not seems beside the point ... Read More...
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