Ten-year-old Sasha, whose Russian immigrant mother cleans offices, routinely comes home from school to an empty, triple-locked apartment. On the day before her project about the Brooklyn Bridge is due, Sasha discovers she doesn’t have... Read More
Good books often give us some laughs and/or add to our knowledge about a relatively unknown subject. In addition to satisfying on both of those counts, this story had to be told—as a form of therapy and pride for its author, but mostly... Read More
For Marissa Guggiana, destination trumps any issues of distance if it means camaraderie and good food. In researching Off The Menu, she visited fifty-one of the nation’s best restaurants, sharing staff meals with the owners, chefs,... Read More
"The New Southern-Latino Table", by cooking instructor and food writer Sandra A. Gutierrez, is both a wonderful cookbook and a fact-filled guide to the fusion of Southern and Latino cooking. Gutierrez grew up in the southern US and in... Read More
Near the end of this book, the author’s high school homeroom teacher asks how “the young man with the highest IQ in his room managed to graduate in the bottom three percent of his class.” Olsen replied, “It was a long story.”... Read More
Whit Hill’s memoir is engaging and interesting, but is it not about Madonna? It’s not. That’s okay. Expecting a memoir by Madonna’s pre-fame roommate to not be about Madonna may be like expecting a minor member of the Jackson... Read More
"God in a Brothel" is a gritty, frighteningly graphic memoir about one man’s journey to use his faith, vocation, and humanity to help women and children who couldn’t help themselves. Page after page, the author discloses the... Read More
Winner of the 2010 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, "Bear Down, Bear North" gathers thirteen stories about the vulnerabilities of the heart as well as on family loyalty enduring in spite of discord. The Alaskans portrayed,... Read More