In 2001, cultural historian Kendall Taylor, Ph.D. published Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage. Now Taylor returns to the same subject matter in The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an [...]
As several of the nearly thirty essayists mention editor Michelle Tea’s collection Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, the very fact that they’re writers gives them a certain privilege, perspective, or both not [...]
Part autobiography and part writing manual, Francesca Lia Block’s The Thorn Necklace: Healing Through Writing and the Creative Process – aptly named after a Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait – discusses growing up in 1980s LA, where [...]
Books, bridges, beards, and beer are a sampling of the cultural aspects Alexander Barrett and Andrew Dickson touch on in This is Portland: The City You’ve Heard You Should Like. Before Alexander Barrett moved to Portland, everyone told him it [...]
Within the opening sentence, Lorrie Moore explains that the title of this book – See What Can Be Done – is not a boast but an instruction she received with almost every note from the editor of The New York Review of Books. “It was a [...]
As one might imagine about a 2017 Man Booker Prize finalist, Fiona Mozley’s debut novel Elmet is well crafted. The title, as explained in an epigraph by Ted Hughes, Elmet was the last independent Celtic kingdom in England and into the [...]
Columbia University alumni Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters have curated 30 essays by women writers, including themselves, on the subject of home in This Is the Place. “We realized that home is a loaded word, a complex idea: it’s a place that is [...]
The twelve stories that comprise Laurie Ann Doyle’s debut short story collection World Gone Missing are a relatable expression of Baby Boomers’ experiences. Characters are often in their late 40s or 50s navigating memories transposed with today. [...]
Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Kate Germano arrived at the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island in South Carolina, an all-female unit, determined to improve the women’s performance. When she succeeded, she was fired. She realized [...]
Chest pain; racing heart; shortness of breath; dizziness. Most people today have experienced these and other telltale symptoms of anxiety. Faith G. Harper is a licensed professional counselor among other consultation specialties and has written [...]
Jaime de Angulo, born in Spain and raised in France, became a legend in California, particularly around the Big Sur as a self-trained linguist and ethnologist, a novelist, and a poet. He traveled around California learning native languages and [...]
Sunset in Wonderland “I am always doing this. Walking around the old neighborhood, always sixteen, moody and stealing cigarettes” (36). I read Wonderland by native-Portlander Matthew Dickman. I read not about a Portlandia-version. I [...]
It would be easy to presume that Will Storr’s book is as cutesy as its title, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, but that would be a mistake. Storr, a renowned long-form journalist, takes the reader on a journey [...]
Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution is a more compelling title than US Transgender History 101. Susan Stryker, a transsexual woman and an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, packs a [...]
If a news station discovers there have been two local shootings, but they only have the resources to send one team at that precise moment, how do the producer, assignment editor, and reporters decide which murder to prioritize? How does the [...]
The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance is the latest collection of published and unpublished works by the renowned American scholar who developed the hero’s journey theory, connecting similar symbols and stages of popular myths from around [...]
Based on the title and the prologue, where editor Clifford E. Trafzer describes how he introduced a colleague to Native American healers who completely eradicated her stage 4 cancer, a reader might expect the rest of American Indian Medicine [...]
Whether someone seeks psychology or spirituality to solve anything from their everyday worries to their existential troubles, Alan Watts asserts in Psychotherapy East & West that the guru or therapist’s only available methodology is trickery [...]
How is shame different from guilt? According to Gerald Loren Fishkin, Ph.D. in The Science of Shame and Its Treatment, someone feels guilt when they’ve done something wrong; shame, the feeling that someone is inherently bad or unworthy, is more [...]
Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero: 9 Stories begins and ends with the two strongest short pieces, which both examine heterosexual marriage from a male perspective. The husbands, willing but almost passive participants, marvel at the changes that overcome [...]
