Read the beginning of Coda: A Novel by René Belletto, translated by Alyson Waters:
"It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.
On Monday, the first of August in the year _ _ _ _ at 9:30 a.m., Anna and I arrived in front of the Parc Monceau in Paris. I was bringing my daughter to the house of her maternal grandparents, Maurice and Maureen Michelangeli.
This month Another Burning Kingdom by Robert Vivian is featured on the Ninth Letter homepage with an excerpt from the book. Philip Graham writes “Vivian's prose travels strange territory, mixing colloquial speech with the heightened language of spiritual insight, a music fusing dissonance and consonance like matches trying to spark a reader alert.” Click here to take a look. Lisa Harper, author of A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood was a guest blogger on Motherhood Later, Rather than Sooner last week. On the blog, Harper discusses her experience of becoming a mother at 36. Read her blog post here. … Continue reading Roundup news
Read the beginning of "The American People" from First Laugh: Essays, 2000-2009 by Margaret Randall:
"The congressman stands on the Senate steps. He adjusts this season’s fashionable pink tie and the little electronic receiver continually threatening to slip from his ear, and faces the camera head-on. Which has him facing us. The reporter makes short shrift of the usual pleasantries: “Thank you, Congressman, for being willing to talk to us tonight.” The congressman smiles and says it’s his pleasure. I know what’s coming next. Whatever the issue, whatever the question about it, and regardless of whether the spokesperson is a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, within the next thirty seconds he or she will use the catch-all phrase, “The American People.” I can bet my future on it.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: First Laugh by Margaret Randall”
Read the beginning of "Expecting" from A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood by Lisa Catherine Harper:
"The story of motherhood doesn’t really begin, at least not always, with the fact of conception. Ask anyone who has found her life transformed by a baby and she will tell you about the time before—the moment, days, weeks, months, or even years—when she waited. Sometimes, of course, as in my mother’s case, a pregnancy takes you by surprise so that one day you find yourself suddenly, unexpectedly pregnant. But for very many others, there is first the decision—the Yes! Sure! Why not? Let’s have a baby!—and then the inevitable wait. Some couples make this decision easily; children are what they’ve always wanted. Others make the choice only after long reflection and deliberation. Our friends, for instance, came to it after nearly ten years of marriage. But once that decision is made, there’s a gap. Some will tell you they got pregnant immediately. Others will tell you long stories about agonizing years of infertility treatments. Every story is different, but the waiting is not. All parents experience that interregnum, a time between two rulers, a time when the solo life seems less sovereign but the dictatorship of the child is not yet an established fact. For many women, it can be a chaotic, unsettling time: we’re not pregnant, which is the one thing we long to be. It makes a lot of us irrational—crazed with the desire for the thing that seems obtainable but which remains always out of reach—until that shock of a day when it isn’t. This time of waiting is a pause, a hiccup, a disjunction in your life when you’re trying to get ready, and you think you are ready, but there’s nothing yet to be ready for.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: A Double Life by Lisa Catherine Harper”
Read the beginning of Chapter 1 from Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman:
"Tallulah Wilson never dies in her dreams.
It’s true. I dreamed with her last summer, for four months. At least I think it was four months. I watched her watching the calendars. I saw the reflections of her eyes in the plastic of her digital clocks. I heard the sounds of coffee machines and I smelled the beans grinding. I had her eyes, her ears, her nose, her whole skin—I sensed the world through Tallulah’s body for those precious four months. Yes, four months. No. It must have been more. Five months. Yes, it must have been five months, because the sickness didn’t hit until the second month of my residence in her head. Maybe five and a half.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Riding the Trail of Tears by Blake M. Hausman”
Read "A Perfect Heart", a poem from Valentines by Ted Kooser: To make a perfect heart you take a sheetof red construction paper of the typethat’s rough as a cat’s tongue, fold it once,and crease it really hard, so it feelsas if your thumb might light up like a match, then choose your scissors from the box. I likethose safety scissors with the sticky bladesand the rubber grips that pinch a little skinas you snip along. They make you careful,just as you should be, cutting out a heart for someone you love. Don’t worry that your curvewon’t make a valentine; … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Valentines by Ted Kooser
Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Lesser Sandhill Cranes", from Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices over America's Wetlands by Paul A. Johnsgard:
"There is a wonderful old tradition in some parts of Scandinavia, in which the children hang their stockings outside their houses during those days in early spring when the European common cranes first return from their wintering areas in France and Spain. Sometimes the children place an ear of corn or some other gift for the cranes, whose welcome voices and overhead flocks are the surest sign of spring and renewed hope for the future after enduring a long, unbearably dark and frigid Scandinavian winter.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Sandhill and Whooping Cranes by Paul A. Johnsgard”
Read the beginning of the Introduction from The Golden West: Fifty Years of Bison Books, Edited by Alicia Christensen, Introduction by David Wrobel: "This superb collection of some of the most enduring writings on the American West is a fitting marker of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint. A half century of republication of classic western literature, history, and folklore is not to be taken lightly. Just as The Portable Faulkner (1946) played a vital role in resurrecting that author’s reputation in the late 1940s and establishing his now hallowed place in the American … Continue reading Off the Shelf: The Golden West edited by Alicia Christensen
Read the Prologue from The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the '68 Racial Divide by Steve Marantz:
"In March 1968, two high school basketball teams played for the Nebraska state championship, a contest with decades of wholesome tradition. But this game was different.
A few days earlier former Alabama governor George C. Wallace had come to Omaha to campaign for president. He brought the Deep South—“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and the jackboots of Selma—and set it down two blocks from Omaha Central High School. His searing rhetoric scalded the sensibilities of many, including eighteen-year-old Dwaine Dillard, Central’s African American basketball superstar.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central by Steve Marantz”
Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Tip-Off" from Bird at the Buzzer: UConn, Notre Dame, and a Women's Basketball Classic by Jeff Goldberg, Foreword by Doris Burke:
"Storrs, March 6, 2001
Sue Bird awoke this snowy Tuesday morning after a night unlike any other in her three years at the University of Connecticut. During the night, while a powerful snowstorm blanketed the state of Connecticut, Bird had lain under her blankets hooked up to a portable stimulus machine, electronic impulses coursing into her balky lower back in an attempt to prevent it from going into spasm any further.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Bird at the Buzzer by Jeff Goldberg”
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