By Sara Dickerman t’s hard to read Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book without getting a little orchard fever. I was just about to send a $50 check in this morning to a stranger in Oregon. The Oregonian, named Nick Botner, grows hundreds of varieties of old apples, plus plums, cherries, and grapes. He was happy to pick a couple of apple trees out for me and send them along, and I then planned to plant them in the parking strip between the street and the sidewalk in front of our house. Too bad then, that, I waded into the city of … Continue reading The Preservation of Fruit

hy it is titled The Night School, I have no idea, since all classes and most of the horror happened during the day like any normal high school, but apparently the publishers and the author are sufficiently removed from high school that just calling it High School didn’t seem scary enough.

I did finish the book.  But only because my husband challenged me.  I ranted and raved to him about how I already knew what would happen and which characters would live and which would die and who would end up with whom.  He said I might be wrong.  So I sat down with a notepad and made a list of all the major characters.  I labeled my list ’83’ for the page I was on in a 325 page book.  And then I made my predictions.  I was dead on.

The book starts with the Morgan teenagers at Christmas, bright, blond, blue eyed Tanner and his bright, blond, blue eyed sister Alexis, putting up the Christmas tree and happy in spite of their filthy rich parents going off to someplace exotic for the holidays and leaving them home.  (Poor little rich kids.)  Enter Matt, their brother.  He has dark hair (Pay attention to description in these books because it will clue you in to the outcome of the character. Beautiful people are important, for good or bad.  Nondescript, too
tall, too pale, too athletic and muscular, and anyone middle-aged who
hasn’t "aged well" is going to end up dead) and is also the jock of the
siblings (Also remember the stereotypes.  Sports=Bad and Paine takes
that cliche and rams it down our throats while doing essentially
nothing with it).

Continue reading “The Night School by Michael Paine”

mmigrant rights marches were fewer and less populous this year. Nonetheless, many dark-haired, olive-skinned (and lighter) people in white T-shirts, some of them carrying Mexican flags, came out into the streets to make America’s immigrants visible. And for that, as an immigrant, I am grateful.

For many of those people, America was the place to survive — and thrive. America for them was and is a place where life can be easier, where jobs are available, and kin communities offer a sense of belonging. America for them was real, and when they came here it was a physical act, mostly, a journey, frequently on foot or on a set of wheels, with ground under your feet. In a sense, they never left.

Consider the invisibles. Graduate students, visiting scholars, foreign-born professors, wives, artists, asylum seekers. The white, non-working-class immigrants. The ones for whom America was a word in the news, a source of political and intellectual discourse, the place whence ideas came — not a land to walk on, a set of streets to navigate, a supermarket shelf to take products from. They are here through the force of life circumstances, as an afterthought almost — America came with a marriage or a career move, a record deal or a research fellowship. What about us?

Continue reading “The invisible immigrant”

Holocaust Girls by S.L. Wisenberg “Wisenberg demonstrates an acute awareness of the absurdities of collective histories as well as individual human lives. . . . The beauty of these essays lies both in their taut, fraught language and the understated punchlines that purposefully upset the balance towards which the author has so artfully striven.”—Lilith Continue reading Praise for Holocaust Girls

Houses of Study by Ilana M. Blumberg “Houses of Study is a love affair with books. . . . For Blumberg, the pleasure of knowledge is always meant to be shared. . . . Her prose soars to a breathless lyricism when she enacts for us the pleasure and perils of conquering an uncharted page of Gemara. . . This book is a union of letters no less magnetic; to enter Ilana Blumberg’s houses of study is, invariably, to become ignited.”—Lilith Read more praise for House of Study Continue reading More Praise for Houses of Study

Elizabeth M. Campbell, Georg von Trapp’s granddaughter and translator of his memoir To the Last Salute, reads an excerpt of the memoir.  Enjoy. Continue reading Podcast: To the Last Salute

Because a Fire Was in My Head by Lynn Stegner “With bracing prose, Stegner turns a potential monster into a character both fascinating and pitiable; you may hate Kate, but you won’t want to leave her.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly Read more on Because a Fire Was in My Head Continue reading More Praise for Because a Fire Was in My Head