A review of In Rooms of Memory by Hilary Masters appeared in this weekend's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In Rooms of Memory is one of the UNP’s newest titles, and is a collection of essays by novelist, short story writer and memoirist Hilary Masters. In his essays, Hilary recalls a summer he spent in New York in his youth when he contemplated running away to Cuba to write with a woman he barely knew, conjuring vivid images of cosmopolitan life in another era. He remembers his father, the famous poet Edgar Lee Masters, and describes growing up with his grandparents in Kansas City while his mother and father rubbed elbows with artists and writers in New York. He thinks about his memories and they way they’ve bent and evolved over the years. This is a thought-provoking book, one that made me think closely about the accuracy of my own memories.

In other news, New Yorker writer Judith Thurman recently delved into the lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. In the article, Thurman explains how the Little House books came to be (Laura wrote a column for a publication called the The Ruralist first, and then set out of write her memoirs), and also stresses the significant role that Lane – who had a tumultuous relationship with her mother — had in the editing of the book (warning to Little House lovers: Laura's idyllic childhood may not have been quite so idyllic as we were led to believe). Lane is an author of two books available from the University of Nebraska Press, Old Home Town and Free Land.(Interesting aside: She was also one of the early leaders of the Libertarian movement). The New Yorker article is available here, and you can listen to an NPR interview with Judith Thurman here.