Need extra motivation? Register at the Super-Early Bird Rate by December 31st, and you’ll get four one-on-one pitches. After that, it’s three.

No project to pitch? The conference is still for you! Aside from meeting with agents, attendees get to rub elbows with bestselling authors and publishing pros — including our keynote speaker, Alice McDermott — hang out with fellow scribes, and enjoy being part of the robust DMV literary community.

Wherever you are on your creative path, don’t miss this chance to let the Washington Writers Conference move you farther along it!

Hosted by Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

Millares Young places the diasporic experiences of her matrilineal line from Spain to Cuba to the United States alongside her research on the ancient goddess Cybele, which she embarks on after making the startling discovery that “God was once a woman.” Her project, as she lays it out in the first essay, “Great Mother,” is “to excavate womanhood, the body, and the sacred.”

Writing candidly about her bout of ovarian cancer at the age of 22, her parents’ multiple cancers, weight and body image, and birth and motherhood, Millares Young doesn’t shy away from exploring corporeal matters. In fact, vesting her female body with power is a large part of her mission. “I spent much of my life accrediting my brain so I would be allowed to rise from this body and be seen for my mind,” she writes. “And yet, as a writer, I’ve learned there is no greater wisdom than that of my womanhood.”

Millares Young also writes of the creative mother’s struggle to make art while caring for her family:

“I ache to create. Without wishing away my sons and husband, I carve tunnels through our time. I climb through these wormholes into worlds of ideas. To control my body is to claim my future.”

In a number of places, we see her simultaneously embracing her role as a mother while striving to make her art. In one noteworthy scene, she is forced to leave her children unattended in a hotel room because they are not permitted to accompany her into the Cabinet des Dessins in the Louvre, where she has come to do research on Cybele. “As I study the mother goddess, I am aware of the gatekeeping that compels me to abandon my maternal obligations to access her,” she writes. “Institutions expel mothers like shrapnel.”

Another central thread Millares Young addresses in the book is the complexity of her identity. She writes:

“I am white and American on my father’s side of my family, and I am Cuban on my mother’s side, darkened by the presence of her father. Those things are not separate in my body. I am Cuban American. That term feels very ’90s. I call myself Latina Latinx Latine in solidarity.”

While she devotes essays to both parents and both sets of grandparents, she lingers more on the Cuban side of her family. After her parents divorced, Millares Young was cared for by her maternal grandparents, Abuela and Abuelo. Abuse at the hands of her grandfather casts a long shadow as she strives to process the complex reasons underlying why her parents and Abuela did not do more to protect her. “Is it possible to be both cherished and neglected?” she asks, excavating her childhood. She concludes that it is. Her “specific trauma,” she writes, is “collective disregard”:

“My family’s refusal to confront what happened has affected me more deeply than the abuse itself.”  

This disregard for her wellbeing is a central preoccupation of Desire Lines. “I still wrack my brain to find an answer to why my mother assigned her father, whom she knew to be a pedophile, to be my primary caretaker and driver,” she writes. “I try not to think of him, but memories appear. I won’t share them with you.” Over and over, she resists offering more details. “I want to be done with this essay, but I’ve been told that I haven’t shared enough,” she writes, quoting extensively from her editor’s comments. Still, she insists on her “opacity,” arguing:

“With my refusal to provide sordid scenes, I ask readers to trust that my dismay was earned. I decline to recreate the abuse so others can decide whether to mete out condemnation or compassion, nor will I reenact my trauma for titillation.”

While she makes a compelling argument, this position at times feels like a continuation of the “silence” that she claims was “the organizing principle” in her family. They did not speak of the abuse, and neither does she — at least not explicitly.

Millares Young’s style is often oblique and even evasive; it’s as though she’s speaking in circles around the abuse, sometimes deflecting with meta-commentary, sometimes disappearing into the background behind her research. She protects herself, understandably, but the result can be a tone that is detached and emotionally distant, keeping the reader at arm’s length and never quite revealing what is most tender and vulnerable.

There is certainly much of interest in Desire Lines, but there is also much that is held back. Millares Young’s book is a balancing act between what she identifies as “the double blade of writing — the invitation and the veil.” By the end, the veil remains stubbornly present, obstructing the reader’s view of the emotional core at the heart of this otherwise shrewd memoir.  

Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of the essay collections The Season of Birds and Stones and Xylotheque, and a collection of short stories, A Catalogue of Everything in the World. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska.

Usually, I’m a quick reader, which served me well at the Bennington Writing Seminars (motto: “Read a hundred books, write one”). Terms began with brief on-campus residencies, during which students met in workshop with the faculty member who would be their mentor for the semester. Off campus, work continued by correspondence. Each month, the student mailed a “packet” containing a manuscript draft, notes on readings, and a letter about writing issues and intertwined life-stuff. The mentor responded with edits, suggestions, and a letter of their own.

Mattison was my first mentor; we met in January 2007. Winter was so cold in Vermont, my eyelashes froze while I walked across campus. But in workshop (and later by mail), Mattison was warm — and blunt, insightful, and incisive. Twenty years on, we’re still in touch.

In a summer residency, poet Donald Hall (Kenyon’s widower) gave a reading. If memory serves, Mattison introduced him; Hall was also her friend.

Mattison’s foreword describes first meeting Kenyon in 1979 at a “poetry fair” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After Mattison read, a woman approached from the audience and “spoke her name in a low, calm voice: ‘Jane Kenyon.’”

Mattison already admired her work; intermittent correspondence soon began. Over time, the two formed an ongoing writing workshop with poet Joyce Persikoff. Kenyon and Hall lived in New Hampshire; Mattison in New Haven with husband Edward and three sons; and Persikoff outside of Boston. After exchanging manuscripts and critiques by mail, they met quarterly.

Beyond the workshop, Mattison and Kenyon visited occasionally and wrote weekly, sometimes daily. They wrote about progress and blocks, acceptances, rejections, money, reviews. About life with spouses, families, dogs. Cooking, food, gardening. Kenyon’s church community, Mattison’s shifts at the soup kitchen. Family illness and their own medical problems: Kenyon’s depression, Mattison’s poor vision.

Each often believed in the other more than the friend believed in herself. They encouraged, sustained, pushed, pushed back, understood, misunderstood, argued, and made up. Coach and adversary combined; not offering “tough love” but honest love.

“Dear Janie,” Mattison writes on October 18th, “I hope you’re sitting at your desk for an hour a day, too, whether you’re writing or not. When I come to see you, I’m going to check your time sheets, so be careful. Much love and hugs.”

“Dear, dear Chum,” Kenyon replies two days later. “Now I’m going to dispense advice — you don’t have to hurry the Big One…Let it grow in the dark like a mushroom. And don’t pick it too soon…Lots of love, Janie.”

Friends for life — or for as long as their time together lasted, just 15 years. Mattison was with Kenyon the day before Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995.

Ten years later, Chad Wriglesworth, a “scholar and professor,” asked Mattison “whether I might let him edit a book of letters between Jane Kenyon and me.”

Hall was his wife’s literary executor. Neither Mattison nor Kenyon had retained copies of her own letters, but each had kept the ones received from the other. Mattison deliberated about publishing them:

“Legally, I had the right to decide only about my own letters…I wasn’t sure Jane would have said yes. Our letters reflected our intense friendship…Jane told me secrets that she didn’t want Don to know. But she was generally unguarded. I thought that if she had survived him she would have talked and written about those parts of her life.”

Mattison and Hall were friends and occasional correspondents. Sometime earlier, she’d been angry to learn he had “shipped off” Mattison’s letters to him to his own University of New Hampshire archive. Now she learned from Wriglesworth he’d also deposited Mattison’s letters to Kenyon in his archive, as well.

Hall was, Mattison avers, “a publicity hound” and was unsurprisingly “delighted” with Wriglesworth’s proposal. She sent Hall copies of Kenyon’s letters, redacting “a few paragraphs, just to make certain that Don never saw them” while he was alive. (He died in 2018; the letters as published are edited for privacy.)

Consenting to Wriglesworth’s proposal, Mattison went to New Hampshire to read her own letters to Kenyon, “afraid I wouldn’t like them.” Instead, she found, “I had forgotten many events...but remembered my feelings…My love and grief had not changed.”

Mattison, Hall, and Wriglesworth all hoped publishing the friends’ correspondence would renew attention to Kenyon’s work. Mattison’s foreword concludes:

“Jane’s letters, like her poems, end decades too early. Reading both, I have a constant sense of what isn’t there — what would have been there if she had lived. But her letters to me add many more words to what we all have from Jane. I am grateful to Chad Wriglesworth beyond anything I can say…”

Prior to reading What Clever Friends, I had only read Kenyon’s Otherwise: New & Selected Poems. The title poem, on the contingent gift of an ordinary day, verges on a mantra for me. Although I had read most of Mattison’s novels, stories, and collected craft essays published after 2004, I was unfamiliar with her earlier work.

To better understand the friends’ dialogue about work in process, I acquired Kenyon’s Collected Poems and Mattison’s first published story collection, Great Wits. These became my concordances, demonstrating that What Clever Friends achieves and surpasses Wriglesworth’s, Hall’s and Mattison’s original hope of renewing attention to Kenyon.

What Clever Friends introduces Kenyon’s private voice, and Mattison’s, too, and it invites further reading of both authors. Throughout the letters and in her foreword, Mattison downplays her relative talent and importance. Kenyon disagreed. Had she lived, perhaps she would have written a gentle, tart rebuttal to Mattison’s self-deprecation.

What Clever Friends requires and speaks in both women’s voices, creating a combined narrative of colleagueship, differences in writing style, practice, and process, and differences in living. Above all, it tells the story of a friendship becoming love and outlasting death.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Blogging as “Girl Writing” in the Independent bi-monthly, she lives in Washington, DC. For many years, Ellen practiced psychotherapy. Her new novel is Vanishing Point.

He develops his thesis over three sections that consider the nation in three critical stages: the new republic (colonial/revolutionary era), the second republic (the Civil War/Reconstruction), and the American empire (the Gilded Age/turn of the century). A crucial ideological and philosophical divergence occurred between the new-republic period and the second, he contends: From 1776 until the 1820s, most Americans believed in the Jeffersonian notion that “all men are created equal,” but this belief fractured with the Missouri Compromise of 1818.

As the young nation gobbled up territories and formed new states, the balance of power between free and slave states became a flashpoint for the small cadre of men — the Southern planters — whose finances were wedded to slavery. Their answer to this threat to their livelihood? Promoting a new, “fringe” idea that all men are not created equal.

Kelly meticulously develops his theory of a Southern “Herrenvolk democracy” (master-race democracy) through the actions and words of its main proponents, from politicians to faux intellectuals, as well as anthropologists promulgating junk science about so-called differences between whites and Black and Indigenous peoples. Tapping into a rich vein of archival and primary sources, he builds a convincing case for how elite, monied slaveowners used scare tactics to bring the Old South’s non-slaveholders — mostly poor Scots Irish “plain folk”— to accept their proslavery views. Fears of slave insurrections and “replacement” were weaponized by these white supremacists as useful bogeymen to “terrify people into abandoning their principles.”

While the Civil War raged, the seeds of this white supremacy were already blooming and would, after the war, begin to sprout in the rest of the country. The biggest lie in American history then, Kelly argues, is white supremacy and the toxic ethno-nationalism that sprang up around it. There were, however, many people across regions and races who denounced the lie, including the inimitable Ida B. Wells, the educator and writer who publicly fought against the discriminatory “separate but equal” laws of the Jim Crow South, and W.E.B DuBois, the brilliant sociologist whose The Souls of Black Folk helped usher in modern liberalism. That book, writes Kelly, was the watershed work that “got through to several northern white intellectuals and philanthropists” and allowed a larger movement of liberal-minded Americans to push back against the Herrenvolk strain of democracy.

Moving from the second republic to American empire in the age of Theodore Roosevelt, the author turns a sharp eye to the divisions between labor and property, citing the “confluence between racial caste and the exploitation of labor.” Concerns among Americans by 1900 that “the greatest danger in the modern world was the tyranny of the rich” is a sentiment modern readers will recognize. One of Kelly’s key themes is how a minority of people with money and power can sow extreme social animosity, political instability, and individual suffering through the promulgation of white nationalism.

That’s not the end of the story, of course, as America grapples once again with pervasive white ethno-nationalism under the Trump administration, one that pits those who believe all men are created equal against those who do not. The Biggest Lie, therefore, offers a cogent and forceful examination of fascism’s roots in the antebellum South, but it can’t predict when or if those roots might finally be ripped out.

Peggy Kurkowski is a professional copywriter for a higher-education IT nonprofit association by day and major history nerd at night. She writes for multiple book-review publications, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, BookBrowse Review, Historical Novels Review, Foreword, Shelf Awareness, and the Independent. She hosts her own YouTube channel, “The History Shelf,” where she features and reviews history books (new and old), as well as a variety of fiction. She lives in Colorado with her partner and four adorable, ridiculous dogs.

The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna by Douglas Smith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Diane Kiesel. “Historian Douglas Smith takes the title of Bettauer’s novel for his new nonfiction work, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna, about the fate of Vienna’s Jews in World War II. Through the microcosm of the family of a Jewish nurse, Mignon Langnas, Smith describes the wider systematic destruction of a people. Based on Mignon’s diaries (started on July 18, 1939, and continued for six years), her letters from Vienna to those who escaped, and Smith’s own meticulous research, this book is hard to put down, yet almost too painful to read. What begins as the drip, drip, drip of petty indignities overflows with descriptions of the torture poured upon the Jews of Vienna. The details land like acid in the eyes and heart of the reader.”

All We Hide: A Novel by Robyn Gigl (Soho Crime). Reviewed by Tim Hennessy. “Lauren’s interest in the 21-year-old case is both professional and deeply personal. Coming out as a trans woman sent shockwaves through Lauren’s personal and professional life: Her marriage ended, and she became persona non grata in the district attorney’s office, where she’d been promoted. In high school, Lauren admired Sherry’s fun-loving spirit and courage, especially the way Sherry lived openly as herself, something Lauren had not yet been able to do. Now, as Lauren rebuilds her own life, she seeks justice for Sherry as a way of honoring her friend’s fiery, independent spirit.”

Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion by Alan Taylor (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Gregory May. “There is, of course, much more to Tower Hill than Nat Turner. Taylor uses the Blow family archive to paint a vivid, nuanced picture of the travails of a failing farmer in the Upper South during the years leading up to the Civil War. Although historians from Avery Craven to Joyce Chaplin, Drew Swanson, and David Silkenat have written about the economic and environmental devastation caused by slave-based agriculture, nothing brings it to life more than Taylor’s account of the decades of struggle described in this family’s many letters. We come to know these people and to understand their predicament.”

Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation by Allan J. Lichtman (Bancroft Press). Reviewed by Kitty Kelley. “On Lichtman’s scorecard, Truman merits a 6. His shortcomings appeared to be his inability to transform governance beyond the New Deal framework or to exercise the subtle political manipulation necessary to produce a lasting electoral realignment. Despite decisive leadership, Truman struggled to sustain a hold over the public.”

Dodge City: A Novel by Patrick deWitt (Ecco). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “Lee heads east with a significant supply of uppers given by a generous friend to help him stay awake on the drive. As he visits relatives along the way, Dodge City becomes the thoughtful ‘amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip’ promised in the publisher’s blurb. The reader is drawn in with every mile traveled, and we grow to respect this contemplative young man trying to understand his place in the world and gain clarity about the present by revisiting the past.”

Be Still My Unbeating Heart by Josh Winning (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). Reviewed by Nick Havey. “No longer shrouded in mystery, they’re just a supernatural, incredibly dangerous part of everyday life. But Bastian isn’t actually dangerous. A threat to nobody, he drinks only farm-animal blood. Nonetheless, when the quaint Cinque Terre town of Vernazza, a region of Italy in which vampires are strictly forbidden from feeding (by international accord), starts sporting more dead bodies than its tiny morgue can handle, Bastian’s human-free diet is less relevant than his status as the only vacationing vampire — and, thus, likeliest suspect — in sight.”

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Rove discussed The Triumph of William McKinley with author/attorney Talmage Boston in late October. Listen to the podcast here.

[Photo by Paul Morse.]

In this film history, author and critic Matt Singer details the rise, boom, and bust of R-rated comedies through the actors, producers, and directors who became synonymous with the genre in the early aughts. Through his well-researched account, moviegoers of this era will gain a new appreciation for the seriously hard work behind goofy films like “Zoolander,” “Anchorman,” “Wedding Crashers,” “Pineapple Express,” and many more.

Each chapter has a leading movie or man (as the author points out, “they were pretty much all dudes”). Singer provides a brief biography and the tumultuous career trajectories of our stars: Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, and others.

In explaining his own career trajectory, Rogen recounts going from the worst kid in karate class to the best in three years, simply because everyone else quit — a lesson in persistence. This anecdote epitomizes a theme Singer repeatedly touches on as he recounts these guys’ careers: They never quit, no matter how much failure or rejection they met with. Even Stiller struggled to break into television and film, and his famous parents, who were in show business themselves, got him his first Broadway role. But perhaps none struggled more than Stiller’s longtime friend and collaborator Apatow. From “The Ben Stiller Show” to “The Cable Guy” and “Freaks and Geeks,” many of his projects suffered from early cancellations or box-office underperformance.

Maybe this was at least in part because, according to Singer, Apatow and Stiller kept “indulging in their weirdest impulses.” “The Cable Guy,” for example, was a dark thriller in which an unhinged cable-company employee (Jim Carrey) crosses innumerable boundaries with a client. But they weren’t just after the bizarre; Singer explains that Apatow and others were adamant about portraying real life (such as when Apatow put his own kids in “Knocked Up” and let them interact organically with the adults) and what felt true to them (like Rogen writing “Superbad,” a screenplay about sexually repressed teenagers, while he still was one).

Every step of the way, Hollywood resisted. At least at first.

Fans may be surprised by the struggle behind the boom, given that these guys seemed capable of making films about anything they wanted (remember the adult-sized bunkbeds in “Step Brothers”?). You wouldn’t be mistaken for feeling this way; Singer did the math:

“From 2006 to 2016, Judd Apatow alone produced twenty-one movies.”

But as Apatow and many of our other leading men became hot commodities, their very success turned against them. Their blockbusters made ensemble casts (like in “Anchorman”) increasingly expensive, as Hollywood couldn’t afford the higher and higher salaries driven by Ferrell, Vaughn, Wilson, and the like. Their individual success disrupted the playfulness of riffing off each other, as they got too busy working on their own projects. And the sheer proliferation of R-rated comedies made their once novel and edgy humor feel overplayed.

The only chapter to break up the boys’ club centers on “Bridesmaids,” the rare female-driven R-rated comedy of the era. The film follows many of the same creative patterns Singer identifies in the male-driven movies that came before it: assembling a cast of funny performers, encouraging a collaborative environment, and leaning into “cringe-inducing laughs.” Yet even in a chapter about women, two dudes — Apatow and Paul Feig (co-executive producer of “Freaks and Geeks”) — retain a central role.

Singer explains how Apatow, its producer, fostered the collaborative spirit and pushed one of the movie’s funniest scenes (the food-poisoning sequence) into its famously outrageous final form, while Feig, who directed “Bridesmaids,” assembled the team that executed it. The two clearly had a positive impact on the movie, but this only reinforces how pervasive the male creative network was during this comedy era. Singer couldn’t tell the story of a female-driven breakthrough without returning to that same network.

Though the author takes a serious look at R-rated comedies of the early aughts, this book, with its titillating subject matter and Singer’s own zingers, is a fun read, one that earns its laughs without skimping on the reporting. But it’s not just a romp through raunchy movies and cringey scenes; it’s the story of a unique moment in film history, one shaped by a band of persistent weirdos all trying to do the same thing: make movies true to their experiences.

Chelsey Stone is a freelance writer and editor. Her travel, literature, and health and fitness coverage has appeared in BBC Travel, National Geographic, Runner’s World, and Outside.

Could you talk about the title of the collection?

What unfolds when a magician has lost touch with himself, a lover, society, the world? What happens when the top hat is empty? We shoot ourselves out of cannons, our mouths fill with ashes. We prepare faces to stave off the shadows. This book offers a meditation on my failures (as a writer, as a lover, as a husband and a parent) with love, not loathing. Our journeys burst through the darkness like the hole in the “Truman Show” ceiling. I’d been thinking a lot about Eliot’s line — “a lifetime’s death in love.” The American Dream increasingly resembles a failed magic show: wet fireworks and a dilapidated carnival midway. Pyrotechnics rule, and it’s a scary, purgatorial landscape we inhabit under the big top. I think about the ultimate magic trick — has humanity come this far before? Each time we evolve and evolve into an “ecstasy of dust.”

There is a wonderful cast of characters in the collection, including family members, friends and lovers, and artists and writers who have had an impact on you. In what ways does an exploration of other people help you understand your own experience?

People inspire the work. I can’t ignore the all-star circus performers I’ve known — many in my immediate family. I’ve always been struck by the epigraph in Campbell McGrath’s work Capitalism: “And my friends will be there too.” There is a poem in Magic Show, “I Saw You, Classifieds.” I was walking to work down 16th Street, and a young woman on a bike caught her tire in a bumper. The bike shot out, and she landed face first. I carried her to the curb and dabbed away blood with a Washington Post. Ten copies of my newly published first book, American Boy, served as a pillow in my satchel. I discovered the russet strands of her hair in the zipper teeth for years. I fell in love and never saw her again. I wonder if she survived.

In a few poems, you allude to your mother’s own love of poetry and efforts to write poems. How did her creative life influence your own? 

It was never overt. My mother dropped hints in the form of poetry books on the table (Frost, Plath, Eliot, Dickinson). She scraped together money for me to have books from the Weekly Reader. I read passages to her about Native American massacres, something we talked about. Her temper flared in a Neapolitan way — zero to 100 miles an hour in seconds. On the day after RFK was shot, she forgot to pick me up at kindergarten. She showed up at dusk, crying in a cream-colored nightgown. That became a poem. During my drop-off drive to UVA, she scribbled a poem entitled “Eye of the Needle,” based on the Native American names on highway signs (Chickahominy, Lightfoot, Toano, Chesapeake…). She cried when we said goodbye, not because she was going to miss me. She wanted to attend a school like that. She loved writing poems. That story is told in “Coda: Vita” from Magic Show.

In some ways, the collection reads like a record of the ways poetry and creativity have shaped you and maybe even redeemed you. Did this arc emerge naturally, or did you set out to examine the role of the arts in your life?

I wanted to relive my journey into poetry. Imagination remains my longest love affair. There is a phrase in Italian: fare una scenata. It means to “make a scene.” I’ve always been a conjurer. Poetry, drugs, and the Grateful Dead crashed into my life at once, offering temporary refuge from the Reagan years until they almost killed me. It led to a lethal combination of experience and self-immolation. The arc flows from the poem “Welcome to Dreamland,” a Howitzer-like wheel of death, a carousel that keeps spinning. Death dominates the first section. Reflections on failed love consume the second section. Memories of childhood, music, and loss take up section three. My poems explore the self as shaped by the ecstatic collisions of youth and art. 

In addition to loving poetry, you have a love of sports. What do you think is the connection between sports and creativity?

Sports mirror life. The initial fissure in my life occurred at age 7, when my father left. The Baltimore Orioles, Colts, and Bullets lost world championships. The Beatles broke up. Losses piled up. I latched onto the players. They became surrogate fathers. I was mesmerized by Paul Blair and Frank Robinson. I am perpetually running under a Johnny Unitas football pass. All my creativity flows from the schism of those years.

Place seems to be important in your poems — in this and your previous collection. How has setting informed your creative life?

Place provides what Stanley Kunitz referred to as the “psychic energy” of a poem. The idea of place in my work can entail reclaiming a vanished world, exploring elegy and loss, and mining cinematic repositories of memory. Baltimore drives the imagery of the first two collections, American Boy and Baltimore Sons. The new book branches out into amusement parks, seaside towns, the American West, and the great beyond. Italy claws its way into all three collections. Places become sites of encounter, giving me a way to move visually from love into loss and back again.

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet, essayist, and teacher. She is currently teaching poetry through the Goucher Prison Education Partnership. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, Threepenny Review, and other journals. She has published three collections of poetry, most recently, The Sky Will Hold (2026). She lives in Baltimore with her family.

There are enough characters in the sprawling cast to populate a limited Netflix series. The three Kaner brothers are the hub that all the others are connected to, and they’ve got problems. Middle brother Red is at odds with his wife, Ruth, because her allegiance as a suffragette aligned her with the dry movement, and the subsequent Prohibition meant the ruin of his liquor business. Their children, twins Rose and Willie, both have firm ideas about their futures, none of which comport with their father’s wishes. Red is a man of strict routine and self-imposed duty, and that feeling trickles down to his loved ones:

“if Red thought of his family in terms of running a business, he had neglected the customer service part of the job.”

Meanwhile, eldest Kaner brother Isaac is still reeling from the tragic loss of his wife and children years earlier and is now selling sacramental wine as a newly ordained rabbi. Youngest brother Lewis is the least troubled of all, determined to live a freer life than his father and brothers, content in a decades-old closeted relationship.

Goldman keeps the plot threads and characters coming, but the most central opens the book: Willie, having run afoul of a local bootlegger by setting up a side-hustle whiskey operation, fakes his own death and skips town in a plan orchestrated by Rose. He’s supposed to lay low but can’t resist the lure of easy money selling booze in a life where his charm has so far guaranteed an exit out of any scrape.

Rose is the opposite of her twin and one of the best characters in the book. Fierce, blunt, and a dead shot even from 200 yards away, she’s determined to control her own destiny. Defying her father’s blinkered wishes, sights set on the future she believes the soon-to-be-ratified 19th Amendment has promised her, she’s left home to save up money to attend medical school. She’s also trying not to think of Marco, a childhood sweetheart who happens to work for the same bootlegger who wants Willie dead. Her rationale:

“Better a broken heart than a broken life.”

Short scenes, precise action, and quick transitions make this tale zoom along with all the alacrity of a morning express train from Minneapolis to Chicago. But just like in a cozy mystery, though death is in the air, there’s no blood to be found, and the dangers that propel the plot largely diffuse into misunderstandings and coincidence. Mistakes that would be fatal in a Mario Puzo saga are forgiven and even inexplicably rewarded.

Goldman is also a playwright and writer for some iconic TV shows, and the tics of his performance-based work have made their way into The Prohibited. The writing is rife with sentence fragments and redundant descriptors. One wishes for an editor to have taken a red pen to sentences like these: “Saul doted on Ruth. Made a show of doting on Ruth. Created a beauty in Ruth” or “Emma and Red’s love went bad. It turned bitter. Acidic. Corrosive.”

Yet he can be a capable prose stylist, with a deft hand for poetically distilling his characters. The wannabe gangster Sherman “was just smart enough to know he wasn’t smart and that irritated him.” Isaac lives one floor below a piano teacher and listens in on lessons, observing that “Few of the kids had talent, but the simple, misplayed music offered him a hope he didn’t understand.” And when a woman removes her wedding ring, never to put it back on again:

“she set it on her plate as if it were a piece of gristle she had pulled from her mouth.”

Here’s the thing: Despite the language tics and head-scratching twists, The Prohibited is, well, fun. And Goldman obviously had fun writing it, unfurling thread upon thread of plot with the ease of a spider adding rings to a voluminous web. That good feeling wafts from the pages, softening the narrative’s rough edges and creating a story as comforting as the roast chicken Lewis makes for his lover. As the author brings his novel to a close, he cushions the already soft landing with mentions of cookies and lemonade, wool throws, and a fire. Is there anything cozier than that?

Priyanka Champaneri is the author of the novel The City of Good Death.

1. Ryan Davison’s review of Partita: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper). “Early in Barbara Kingsolver’s electrifying new novel, it’s explained that a partita ‘is a musical composition made of many parts with different paces and moods. The contrast is the point. The parts are all different, and the artist’s work is to make them add up to something that feels whole.’ For a work that hurls readers across jagged emotional landscapes while fusing themes of class, obsession, politics, and abandonment into a cohesive, compelling narrative, the title applies perfectly. Much of the power in Partita comes from its impressive literary variation.”


2. Mariko Hewer’s review of Exit Party: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf). “Decades later, Ari is living in a Paris over which a controversial artificial dome is being erected to keep out the extreme effects of climate change. (‘The dome will protect us against the heat and the storms,’ reflects her husband, ‘but what if something happens inside the dome?’) After reconnecting with a past acquaintance and being reminded of the strange events at the L.A. party, Ari is forced to accept that, canny as she is, there are some twists she can’t predict.”


3. David O. Stewart’s review of Agrippa: A Novel of Ancient Rome’s Descent into Dictatorship by Robert Harris (Doubleday). The reader waits for emotional rage, vituperation, vengeance. And waits. But no. Agrippa has battles to win, roads and giant construction projects to build, so he shrugs, takes a deep breath, and sets his shoulder to the wheel of duty. This is the tale of a natural henchman, an instinctive No. 2. Shakespeare wrote two plays featuring Agrippa’s contemporary and rival, Mark Antony, a man who dared greatly, loved dangerously, and ended ignominiously. Agrippa defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium, but it is Antony whose fame endures, who still claims our imaginations.


4. Kitty Kelley’s review of Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation by Allan J. Lichtman (Bancroft Press). “In the pages that follow, Lichtman captures the humanity of each man — their faults and foibles, coupled with their titanic strengths. He then grades them on what he calls the Crisis Key, the Transformation Key, the Moral Vision Key, the Hidden Hand Key, the Stewardship Key, the Realignment Key, the Institution Builder Key, the Narrative Key, the Diplomatic Pivot Key, and the Adaptability Key. The only president to turn all 10 keys of greatness, ‘the architect of the modern American state and its place in the world,’ is Franklin D. Roosevelt. ‘His legacy lives on not only through policies and precedents but also in the very fabric of American political life.’”


5. “Entering the ‘Otherwhere,’” by Amanda Holmes Duffy. “One morning, we were preparing to unpack a shipment of books and manuscripts that had been in storage for many years when Carolyn received an email informing her of the death of an old friend and fellow writer. As we talked about her friend, I told her to wait for a sign from him. She had just gone downstairs when I opened up and began unpacking one of the boxes at random — only to discover, on top of the stack, several books written by this deceased friend and inscribed to Carolyn. Such experiences were not uncommon while I was working with her.”

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In And I Will Tell You Mine, Bush shares stories about what has most shaped her: her childhood in Los Angeles, the unexpected road from journalism student to actor, navigating Hollywood and fighting for her character’s integrity, and the realities of marriage and divorce. She also offers sides of herself not often seen: the lifelong learner, the friend, the adventurer. And I Will Tell You Mine is an account of becoming, un-becoming, and becoming again to return home to our truest selves.

Bush will be in conversation with Aaron Parnas, an independent journalist, political commentator, and attorney.

Hosted by Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

In Electric Spark, award-winning biographer Frances Wilson takes on a complicated subject. Dame Muriel Spark, the prolific author who died in 2006 at age 88, may be best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one of her more than 20 novels, yet she also wrote short stories, poetry, radio plays, and an autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. Years before her death, Spark selected Martin Stannard as her biographer, initially giving him free range of her personal archives. Later, reading his drafts and dissatisfied by his work in progress, she broke off the collaboration. (Nevertheless, he published his book shortly after her death.)

How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington by Marcia Chatelain (Pantheon). Reviewed by Robert Beauregard. “How Bright the Path Grows is a book with an outspoken feminist agenda. Chatelain wants historians to acknowledge the brave and talented women who gave so much to the pursuit of racial justice and received so little in return. Consequently, this is history less academic than popular, one devoid of nuanced debate and heavy on individual stories. Its goals are to provoke and inspire, as well as to inform, and the author does all three quite ably.”

Dodge City: A Novel by Patrick deWitt (Ecco). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “Lee heads east with a significant supply of uppers given by a generous friend to help him stay awake on the drive. As he visits relatives along the way, Dodge City becomes the thoughtful ‘amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip’ promised in the publisher’s blurb. The reader is drawn in with every mile traveled, and we grow to respect this contemplative young man trying to understand his place in the world and gain clarity about the present by revisiting the past.”

Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe by Emily Ogden (Viking). Reviewed by Marcie Geffner. “In Poe’s correspondence, Ogden finds a passionate, willful, and self-destructive man who possessed a canny ability to maneuver others into giving him what he wanted. His actions could be so inexplicable that Ogden likens him to ‘a penguin with a faulty compass [that] will set out toward the fatal Antarctic interior if no one flicks him back into the seabound flock.’”

Be Still My Unbeating Heart by Josh Winning (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). Reviewed by Nick Havey. “Be Still My Unbeating Heart tries to do a lot, and that’s part of the pleasure. Formulaically, it’s a cozy whodunit, but it’s also a travel romance that features as its main characters a vampire who was turned in the 1970s (and who no doubt shares cultural references with his creator, author Josh Winning) and a talking cat á la ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch.’ Bastian (the vamp) and Whitby (his kitty companion) inhabit a world in which vampires are a known quantity. No longer shrouded in mystery, they’re just a supernatural, incredibly dangerous part of everyday life.”

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I am not a boat person. I don’t like the rocking, the drifting, the loss of solid ground. When I agreed to my first sailboat ride with friends on the Chesapeake Bay one afternoon, I ended up throwing up over the side. It kind of killed the party.

Be Still My Unbeating Heart tries to do a lot, and that’s part of the pleasure. Formulaically, it’s a cozy whodunit, but it’s also a travel romance that features as its main characters a vampire who was turned in the 1970s (and who no doubt shares cultural references with his creator, author Josh Winning) and a talking cat á la “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Bastian (the vamp) and Whitby (his kitty companion) inhabit a world in which vampires are a known quantity. No longer shrouded in mystery, they’re just a supernatural, incredibly dangerous part of everyday life.

But Bastian isn’t actually dangerous. A threat to nobody, he drinks only farm-animal blood. Nonetheless, when the quaint Cinque Terre town of Vernazza, a region of Italy in which vampires are strictly forbidden from feeding (by international accord), starts sporting more dead bodies than its tiny morgue can handle, Bastian’s human-free diet is less relevant than his status as the only vacationing vampire — and, thus, likeliest suspect — in sight.

The first victim, Luna, a well-known and liked villager, is found on the beach with her throat ripped out. A vampire seems the likeliest culprit, but then Bastian and Whitby find an infinity symbol next to the body that’s linked to a local vampire-supporter group. The clue leads the pair to the cat café where the victim worked; it also turns out to be the vampire-supporters’ meeting place.

As Bastian and Whitby pursue the killer while under suspicion themselves — and while being chaperoned by Nico De Luca, a cop assigned by the anti-vamp police chief — the author deftly breadcrumbs a series of trails for the reader to follow while setting up the romance promised on the book’s cover (between Bastian and the handsome Nico, who has secrets of his own).

Could it be the town’s pro-vampire mayor orchestrating the murders? A jilted ex-lover of the first victim covering his tracks? A mysterious cabal of townspeople trying to drive tourists away? Or is Bastian really the killer everyone seems to think he is?

A romp of a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously and plays on all the right tropes (hello, one bed to share) without indulging in any vampirism-as-deus-ex-machina shortcuts, Be Still My Unbeating Heart had my blood pumping and my pulse racing until its conclusion. If I hadn’t already loved his earlier novel, Heads Will Roll, Winning would’ve won me over anew.

Nick Havey is a thriller and mystery writer and a lover of all fiction. His work has appeared in the Compulsive Reader, Lambda Literary, and a number of peer-reviewed journals.

These titles may be vastly different from one another, but they share something in common: They’re each frightening — to somebody, at least — in their own way. (Except for a certain work by Truman Capote, which is apparently scary to a lot of people in a very similar way.) Read on…

The conversation will also celebrate the 20th anniversary edition of Susan’s internationally acclaimed debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, a landmark work of Palestinian literature that has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. Spanning six decades, four generations, and three continents, the novel follows a Palestinian family’s journey through displacement, loss, love, and the enduring struggle for identity and belonging.

Abulhawa will also discuss and sign her new children’s book, Palestine on the Moon, a story of how Palestine went to the moon — and saved the world!

Hosted by Busboys and Poets @ 14th & V, 2021 14th St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

“Poe speaks directly to us, as if we will surely understand — as if we, too, could have been, or are, among the worst,” she writes. “To join his crew of castaways, you need to be ready to go to the edges of human experience: to madness, to loneliness, to pain and the causing of pain. You need to follow him.”

The bare facts of Poe’s life, as Ogden relates them, are grim. Born in 1809 and orphaned at age 2, he grew up as a charity case on a plantation in Virginia. A short time at a university where enslaved people attended to his and other students’ everyday needs left him not only able to pass examinations in Latin and French, but also burdened with gambling debts he had no ability to repay.

After a series of arguments with his foster father, Poe fled the plantation, only to fall into poverty and struggle with depression, alcoholism, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts. His stories were popular, in demand, and often published and reprinted in magazines, but he typically earned little or no money for his work. At the time, Ogden explains, “The idea that writing was a profession from which one could make a living was still new.”

At 26, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, who later contracted consumption (tuberculosis). While his young wife wasted away, coughing up blood for years, Poe faced the endless specter of her death and “wrote constantly” to try to earn enough money to keep her warm and fed. Says Ogden:

“The force of death and the force of life pressed constantly on him...Death demanded that he sit down on the floor and weep; life demanded that he get a job.”

In Poe’s correspondence, Ogden finds a passionate, willful, and self-destructive man who possessed a canny ability to maneuver others into giving him what he wanted. His actions could be so inexplicable that Ogden likens him to “a penguin with a faulty compass [that] will set out toward the fatal Antarctic interior if no one flicks him back into the seabound flock.”

It is Poe’s darkness that makes his writing irresistible to readers, she argues. As examples of these most avid readers, she cites the poet Charles Baudelaire, who translated Poe’s work into French in the 1840s; the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who translated his work into Spanish in the 1950s; and Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon, who used Poe’s stories to trigger nightmarish fears she would later discuss during psychoanalysis sessions with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s.

Ogden adds herself to the list of the Poe-obsessed. In the book, she explores her own dark experiences, including, as a child, “episodes of sharpened perception” and dreams in which she mentally designed houses with multiple basements and curving staircases, and, as an adult, the violent deaths of her backyard chickens and the loss of a beloved dog.

Essays in which she relates the mysterious circumstances of Poe’s untimely death in 1849 and expresses her fervent wish for him to have lived forever are especially powerful:

“I knew that unless books kept being written, renewing Poe’s life and art — unless epiphanies continued to visit his readers — he would be gone. I would help keep him alive a little longer, and I wouldn’t mind if the effort was absurd, like ferrying [my] dying dog back and forth between his daytime and nighttime hospitals.”

The book has some less-than-wonderful elements, too. The introduction is confusing, and the chronology is difficult to follow at times. The Freudian dream analysis is heavy-handed and problematic. And Ogden’s fictional imaginings of incidents in Poe’s life can seem presumptuous or disrespectful of historical facts.

These flaws aside, her creative mashup of biography, history, literary criticism, and memoir ultimately resolves into a thoughtful and engaging narrative about why Edgar Allan Poe’s darkest stories still attract and fascinate us today.

Marcie Geffner is a journalist, writer, and literary critic in Ventura, California.

This isn’t the start of a horror story but rather a romance. Ralph Rich was 43 years old in 1933, when he invited Louise and her fellow travelers to join him on that forested riverbank. Louise was only 30, but she found Ralph’s dry sense of humor and commitment to leaving his urban life behind attractive. Eight months later, they were married, and Louise, too, could leave her city life to move to remote, backwoods Maine.

It was another August in Maine, over 90 years after Louise’s canoe trip, when I climbed the steps of a seaside bookshop and navigated the wobbling piles of books. In the dimly lit shop, overseen by a bookseller nearly as dusty as his wares, I picked up a pretty green book with a gold pinecone decorating the front cover: Happy the Land. The story of a woman living in Maine’s forests in the 1930s and ‘40s sounded interesting. I bought it.

In her foreword to Happy the Land, her second book, Louise explains that Ralph died unexpectedly on a snowy December night in 1945. Devastated, she turned to writing to remember and record the joy she found in their shared home.

Happy the Land is thus filled with anecdotes, as Louise recalls summer afternoons playing raucous baseball using sticks, or the fawn found desperately swimming in the lake that she nursed back to health using her own baby’s formula and bottles. Louise, by her own account, likes to “yak,” and she makes for very pleasant company.

The premise of the book, though, might be troubling for modern readers. Louise was raised, she tells us, in Massachusetts, “where every stone is stained with the blood of a patriot, every ancient elm once shaded a treaty signing…The weight of history lies upon everything.” And she is sick of it.

She loves her new home, which “had no past, in the accepted sense of the word.” The Native American (“Indian,” she says) stories are “purely personal” — like hers. I have to imagine the Abenaki people and others forced from those lands would disagree.

In fact, those personal stories are the only history Louise believes in here, and they give the book its title. She writes, “Happy the land, someone has said, that has no history.” History, she implies, has lost its moral standing, particularly when whole cities can be wiped out and “races subjected to unthinkable things in the name of History.”

From the distance of the 80 years since Louise published her book, that argument seems both understandable and myopic. Happy the Land offers both time travel (Louise cooks breakfast on a wood-burning stove, and when the grate falls out of that, in the living-room fireplace) and time blindness. The book was written during World War II and encompasses some events that took place during that timeframe, yet it only mentions the conflict in passing, by way of explaining the shortage of men to work. Louise’s disregard for the larger canvas of History is apt for her theme but uncomfortable.

We cannot escape the histories that have shaped us.

Still, as I delight in Louise’s peppy adventures canoeing and trekking around western Maine, I wonder, too, if she doesn’t have a point. Perhaps even a feminist point. Histories are, after all, just stories. They are stories that happened to people.

If we lose track of the individual in the sweeping panorama, we lose track of truth. Messy decisions seem, from the sanitizing distance of centuries, inevitable. Of course the colonists in Louise’s home state of Massachusetts would choose to throw the tea into Boston Harbor in protest of taxes; of course George Washington decided to cross the Delaware River.

But by reminding us that all we have are personal stories, Louise is also (inadvertently) reminding us that histories are complicated narratives of choice.

In this age of disempowerment, when it’s so easy to feel that, as individuals, we have no control over our lives, Louise’s stories of her beloved family home in Maine are both an entertaining balm and a useful tonic.

And I think she’s right about at least one thing: Every story matters.

Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow. She lives in Maryland with her family and four ridiculous cats. You can keep up with her and her future columns on Instagram or Substack.

For a set of wheels, he registers with a car-delivery service, masterfully fakes his way through the interview, and is soon handed a brand-new Jaguar that “looked just to have been minted, the paint a rich British racing green, the nubs still on the tires.” Lee agrees to carefully transport the gorgeous automobile to a buyer in New Jersey; in truth, he intends to drive it to the Canadian border.

The one sticking point in his departure plan is a matter of the heart. He is unsure what to do about his girlfriend, Calliope, but finds a note bubble-gummed to his front door that wonderfully displays author Patrick deWitt’s talent for adopting the voice of Cal and his other characters:

“I can’t do the big goodbye scene, Lee. I love you basically but I can’t do it and I’m sorry, seriously. I’m my mother’s daughter, and she taught me that all emotion must be ground to a powder and tossed down the well, so that’s my method for dealing with your leaving. Will you call me from the road? You can yell at me, then forgive me? Or not yell at all, and the forgiveness will just come naturally, the way it does sometimes.”

Lee heads east with a significant supply of uppers given by a generous friend to help him stay awake on the drive. As he visits relatives along the way, Dodge City becomes the thoughtful “amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip” promised in the publisher’s blurb. The reader is drawn in with every mile traveled, and we grow to respect this contemplative young man trying to understand his place in the world and gain clarity about the present by revisiting the past.

He encounters his father, a WWII veteran, asleep behind the wheel of a white van. It sits in the dirt driveway of Lee’s childhood home. Dad is now a dog-catcher, and the house shelters dozens of feral canines; Lee’s dad intermittently lets a couple of them loose to keep his retrieval business thriving. The father-and-son interactions, though soaked in gloom, are hilarious.

Lee’s mother is deeply manic, and he hasn’t spoken to his brother, Harry, in years. Only Lee’s twin sister, Grace, a nurse at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital, does he find truly relatable.

Varying from eccentric to psychotic, tender to drunk, each Clarke provides interactions that are uniquely authentic. Taken together, they add important insights to Lee’s journey and offer readers a genuine taste of 1960s America. The novel perfectly captures the absurdity of family dynamics and blends it with just the right amount of dry humor.

DeWitt’s smooth prose fuses into an intelligent, streamlined narrative that’s a pleasure to follow. The dialogue — as in his darkly comic The Sisters Brothers, shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize — is punchy and realistic, but even during emotional exchanges, the author never fails to entertain. Dodge City forces us to confront the moral dilemmas brought on by the draft, but it does so in a sneakily poignant, sympathetic way. It’s a remarkably readable story, and one that’s relevant in our current moment, when endless wars again demand an endless supply of ambivalent young people to fight them.

Ryan Davison, Ph.D. is a regular contributor to the Independent, Open Letters Review, Edelweiss+, and NetGalley. His work has also recently appeared in the Chicago Reader and the Malahat Review, and his blurbs are often cited by LitHub’s Book Marks, the popular book-review aggregator.

You write that Price “was a horror icon, a camp icon, and a queer icon — three iconic statuses that somehow didn’t earn him the glorious respect he so clearly deserves.” As a TV-obsessed kid from the 1970s and 80s, I agree! There’s something irresistible about a man who can appear in the “Creature Feature” during the day and guest star on “The Love Boat” at night. When was your own admiration for him born?

Like many of my generation, my fascination with Vincent Price began with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Price’s vocals for that song really do make for the best duet in Jackson’s epic music catalog. Who can forget Price’s sinister delivery of “Darkness falls across the land...” or that intoxicatingly evil laugh at the end? Now, that’s true harmony.

It may seem strange to cite a hit record as one’s gateway drug into an actor’s filmography, and maybe it wasn’t quite that. Maybe it was simply an unforgettable introduction to an endlessly curious performer — debonair, flirtatious, quick-witted, wicked... Plus, he seemed to be everywhere. Hosting PBS’ “Mystery!” Guest-starring on “The Muppet Show.” Camping it up as a Batman villain. Even hawking Tilex mildew remover in commercials. After all these passing encounters, I decided to get to know him better through his movies. And I found out I liked him. A lot.

Not only do you list all of Price’s films — from both the big screen and small — but you recap each one. How much rewatching did this require, and did the experience teach you anything about his oeuvre that you didn’t already know?

Rewatching a Price movie is never a requirement. It’s an opportunity! I’ll welcome any excuse to rewatch “Edward Scissorhands,” “The Ten Commandments,” “The Song of Bernadette,” “The Fly,” and nearly all those Roger Corman adaptions of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic tales. The biggest discoveries for me came via his made-for-TV movies, which I wasn’t that familiar with beforehand. Especially memorable are Playhouse 90’s Cold War thriller “Forbidden Area,” costarring Tab Hunter (and featuring a suspenseful plot from screenwriter Rod Serling), and General Electric’s “The Ballad of Mender McClure,” a totally unexpected precursor to Roberto Gavaldón’s “Macario,” a classic now widely considered one of the greatest Mexican films of all time.

Price was truly sui generis, but do you see echoes of him in any current pop-culture figures?

The first person to come to mind is honestly Nicolas Cage, a performer equally unafraid of being theatrical, even hammy, but also capable of showing depth and vulnerability. He, too, started off working with major talent, then had a career slump, then got a reboot via genre pics — albeit action instead of horror. Another kindred performer who would probably be better suited to playing Price is Willem Dafoe, who is arguably at his most effective when deranged. Additionally, Dafoe — like Price — often feels like a bit of an anachronism. So what if Price is from some half-glimpsed past, while Dafoe is from a different space-time continuum?

If you’re wondering why my choices are both older actors, I’d like to point out that Price didn’t really hit his stride until later in life. “House of Wax,” the 3-D blockbuster that solidified Price’s fame, didn’t happen until he was in his 40s. So you couldn’t possibly show Price potential until you’d made it at least as far as middle age.

In an unusual move, you begin the book with the full text of your “Price in Purgatory: A Live Radio Play,” which was performed in Manhattan in 2023. How did the production come about, and why was it important to include it here?

I had originally envisioned “Price in Purgatory” as an elaborate dance-theater piece. Then reality hit. As a minor playwright greying at the temples, I was never going to get the necessary funds to back a lavish production involving tap dancing and the cha-cha. And so I scaled way back — stripping away the need for actors-who-dance or a choreographer or various designers or a roomy rehearsal studio or a fog machine. Funnily enough, the shift also made logical sense because Price is remembered first and foremost for that signature voice. I mean, radio really is the ideal format. I suppose I put the play up front because I wanted the reader to hear Price as I imagined him before I sent them off to watch all those wonderful movies. I wanted them to enter his filmography with a playful spirit, not a hypercritical one.

Finally, Halloween is the perfect time to introduce neophytes to Price’s scary-movie canon. Where would you suggest they start?

Since Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, I’d like to recommend a double-feature. Start off with “House on Haunted Hill,” which spotlights Price’s most iconic performance. In this B-movie directed by William Castle, Price plays a slick and sinister know-it-all who delights in terrorizing his guests to death. I’d pair it with “The Tingler,” another Castle fright flick, this one about a mad scientist hoping to discover what exactly makes humans “tingle” when they’re afraid. (Spoiler alert: It’s something like a giant centipede.)

“The Tingler” possesses some inexplicably gay cruising between a movie theater owner and Price’s character at the local autopsy lab following a death-penalty execution. Naturally, this leads to LSD experimentation. It’s that kind of movie. If, however, you only have time for a single film, go with “The Haunted Palace,” an absolutely wackadoodle horror pic that showcases Price in a many-layered performance as a man possessed by an ancestral warlock. Think The Picture of Dorian Gray meets “The Three Faces of Eve” meets “Poltergeist II,” as written by H.P. Lovecraft. Scary good.

[Photo by Miriam Berkley.]

Holly Smith is editor-in-chief of the Independent. She’s still upset that Vincent Price was never on “Fantasy Island.”

By third period, I’d heard from two other teachers that my dad was cool. My father was smart, hardworking, and short, his round head circled with thinning grey hair. He was sonorous on the pulpit and gullible for charity appeals that came in the mail. He wore black suits from J.C. Penney’s. A staunch anti-Communist, my dad, a Republican, believed in the necessity of the Vietnam War.

My dad was not cool. 

Though my father, Jacob Kim, came to America before the Korean War of 1950-1953, he remained a loyal nationalist and gave presentations in church basements and Kiwanis clubs to garner support against Communist North Korea. In these community gatherings, he explained how the Soviets and Red Chinese had instigated North Korean aggression to start the Korean War, where their sons were fighting, and he stressed his belief that Communism was an encroaching evil to be feared. 

I don’t remember exactly how my father managed to attend the PTA meeting, but the school had been buzzing with news that angry parents would protest the inclusion in a social-studies class of Mao’s Little Red Book and Marx & Engel’s Communist Manifesto. Somehow, my father heard this news, but he wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. In our family, with four kids in college, the remaining two of us were busy with our Beatle-manic Americanized lives, and we orbited distantly around our parents, together only on the occasions we landed at the dinner table or watched “Mission: Impossible” on TV. It’s typical that I wouldn’t have known he’d attended the PTA meeting.

In the last period of that school day, the choral director mentioned my father’s wonderfulness, and I begged to know the whole story. And so the entire chorus heard about the PTA meeting, and much later, I learned additional details from my father.

In the crowded gym where the meeting was held, outraged parents led a heated discussion to ban The Little Red Book and The Communist Manifesto. They insisted that teaching these books would foster dangerous radicalism in their children. The social-studies and history teachers objected, but parents were adamant. Someone called for a vote. My father walked to the front of the seated parents. He would’ve still been in his black suit and wide, colorful tie. I imagine that he used his preacher’s voice. 

He told about the Korean War — the entire peninsula in such chaos that every Korean citizen, even those in the diaspora, was affected. He had not heard from his elderly parents in North Korea since before the war, and no longer expected to. One of his daughters, my third-eldest sister, had lived in South Korea during the war and was 3 when North Korea invaded at 1:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Our relatives fled Seoul by foot, pulling a handcart, among mobs of refugees. My father spoke about other relatives, a mother and her 5-year-old daughter, who joined the panicked southbound masses. She lost hold of her daughter’s hand and never saw her child again. 

The Korean War never officially ended; a stalemate yielded a tenuous peace still threaded together by an armistice. The Communist threat was, and still is, a daily fact for South Koreans. My father, more than anyone else in that room, had the right to request that the teaching of these Communist books be banned — but if it came to a vote, he said, he would vote “no.” Proudly naturalized just six years before, I’m certain my father cited the First Amendment, though freedom-of-speech protections for children in public schools would not become law until the following year. 

As I recall this story, an anecdote my mother had told about my father as a young man comes to mind. Sometime in the mid-1930s in Korea, her weekdays meant a two-hour train ride to attend Ewha Women’s College in Seoul. A man from Pyongyang who turned out to be my father’s father took notice and began the process of sharing information for an arranged marriage. She admired my father’s education in theology and his striking, dapper appearance. She learned about an incident when he was so immersed in study that even his stern father couldn’t rouse his attention until, at last, he closed the two books spread on his desk. My father had been simultaneously reading the Bible and Karl Marx. 

At the PTA meeting, when my father said that reading Mao’s Little Red Book would not make us Communists, they listened. When he said that reading breeds intelligence and understanding, not treason, fear, or hatred, they heard him. No vote was taken. And my dad became cool, the teachers’ hero.

That day gave me a glimpse into my father’s previously hidden history and something great about his character. To us, his children, he had never once expressed the immense pain he’d experienced throughout Japanese Colonization or the Korean War, but for the sake of education and the freedom to read, he did so to a crowd of other parents who wanted, and failed, to ban books from our classrooms. 

[Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on the author’s website.]

Eugenia Kim is the award-winning author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter and The Kinship of Secrets. Fellowships include three-time Washington, DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. She’s a newly retired professor at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program and served as the 2025-26 board chair of the Writer’s Center. She loves how storytelling changes lives. 

Chatelain, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, seeks in her new book, How Bright the Path Grows, to re-balance the historical record: Black women were more than “appendages to movement leadership.” She profiles Parks, Bates, Richardson, and Hedgeman, along with voting-rights activist Prince Estella Melson Lee; Myrlie Evers (widow of the slain Medgar); Freedom Riders organizer Diane Nash; renowned singers Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, and Odetta; well-known choir director Eva Jessye; and cabaret performer Josephine Baker, a questionable inclusion given that Baker lived in France and had little direct involvement in civil-rights activities in the United States.

What led Chatelain to write about these women is that they were all invited to the 1963 March on Washington, attended by an estimated half-million people and “one of the most significant events in the story of American democracy.” Their inclusion in the program, however, was achieved only after standing up to the men who conceived and planned the march.

Initially, these men proposed simply acknowledging the women from the main stage. Under pressure, they eventually agreed to a tribute during which Jackson and Anderson would sing and a few women would make brief remarks. On the day of the march, unfortunately, Randolph bungled his tribute. As Chatelain comments, this “did nothing to retire any of [Hedgeman’s] criticisms of the sexism still in the movement,” while Richardson considered the “nod to the women” embarrassing and insulting.

And although the march included a pre-program at which Odetta and soprano Camilla Williams performed and Baker briefly spoke, it was held early in the day and far distant from the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Chatelain notes the disparity in the fame and fortune achieved by some of the men in the movement compared to the women. Frequently in debt, Parks, for example, lived a precarious existence despite being “the unofficial patron saint of the Black struggle.” And Myrlie Evers, whom Chatelain describes as “a true voice and face of the movement,” had to decline her invitation to the March on Washington for financial reasons.

How Bright the Path Grows is a book with an outspoken feminist agenda. Chatelain wants historians to acknowledge the brave and talented women who gave so much to the pursuit of racial justice and received so little in return. Consequently, this is history less academic than popular, one devoid of nuanced debate and heavy on individual stories. Its goals are to provoke and inspire, as well as to inform, and the author does all three quite ably.

I was disappointed, though, that Chatelain portrayed these women almost solely as activists. They were manhandled by police and racist counter-protesters; insulted and ostracized in public; targeted by anonymous threats; underappreciated by the men with whom they worked; and ceaselessly in search of a decent job. Their lives were fraught with anxiety, fear, and disappointment. Missing from the profiles — and, seemingly, their lives — was laughter, delight, and intimacy. I wanted these women to be more than symbols of moral steadfastness; I wanted them to be people.

(The words of early-20th-century activist Emma Goldman come to mind: “I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful idea, anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. If it meant that, I did not want it.”)  

Nonetheless, this book tells a sobering, all-too-familiar story of women whose accomplishments were attributed to men or relegated to historical footnotes. Chatelain deserves considerable praise for doing her part to resist and correct the “impulses that regularly shunt women from the center frame of history.”

Robert Beauregard is emeritus professor at Columbia University writing on politics, postwar U.S. history, social theory, and current events.

As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of six novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. Her previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honors, has been translated into 36 languages, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles. Her latest novel is Exit Party (Knopf, September 2026).

St. John mandel will be in conversation with Ron Charles. Charles was a book critic for the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post for three decades. He now writes about books on Substack.

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