Monday: June’s Children’s Book Roundup.

Tuesday: An interview with Elizabeth Poliner, author of Spinning at the Edges: A Novel.

Wednesday: Podcast: Matthew Pearl, author of The Award: A Novel.

Thursday: In an essay, contributor Lawrence De Maria looks at James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels.

Friday: A review of Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora; translated by Rahul Bery.

Saturday: ICYMI: A review of What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything by Jessa Crispin.

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For many centuries, India seemed to be mostly on the receiving end of outside influences. Dominated first by Persian-speakers in medieval times, and then by the British from the 18th century to the end of World War II, India in popular perception has only in recent history become a global political, cultural, and economic leader.

Actually, history is repeating itself. In his latest book, The Golden Road, India scholar William Dalrymple asserts that the country was the most consequential power of the ancient world, with “Indian learning, Indian religious insights, and Indian ideas…among the crucial foundations of our world.”

The period 250 BCE to 1000 CE saw the peaceful spread of Indian art, architecture, mathematics, science, language, and belief systems across a region spanning the Red Sea to Indonesia. The “Indosphere,” as Dalrymple terms it, was integral not only to the development of ancient Asia, but would have echoes centuries later in Europe.

India’s early clout can be chalked up in part to geographic accident. “Thanks to the winds of the Asian monsoon,” explains the author, “India lies at the center of a great network of navigable sea roads and maritime trade routes.” These were far superior to slow, hazardous overland caravans, and India parlayed its early shipbuilding and sailing acumen to become an indispensable trading partner with the Roman Empire, and later — after the fall of Rome — with the rest of Asia.

Trade was not just economics. It was instrumental in carrying Indian intellectual and cultural innovation — including the tenets of two major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, that originated in India — beyond its own territory. Scholars from across the ancient world flocked to such Indian bastions of study as the Buddhist monastery at Nalanda, while Buddhist and Hindu missionaries and traders spread across Central Asia, China, and Southeast Asia.

They brought with them Indian ideas regarding not only religion but also art, architecture, and science. Sanskrit became the common means of communication across ancient Asia. Such was the power of Indian influence that outside admirers matched or exceeded the Indians themselves in their artistic and architectural endeavors — for example, in the construction of the unparalleled Hindu temple of Angkor Wat in what is now Cambodia.

But it did not last. India’s predominance ended with an influx of Persianized Turks fleeing the Mongol invasion of Central Asia in the 13th century. Writes Dalrymple:

“Ill-spoken and destructive foreigners with no sense of beauty or decorum had arrived in the Indic heartlands, overthrowing not just the political but also the civilizational order.”

The great centers of learning fell, Persian (and, centuries later, English) superseded Sanskrit as the lingua franca, and India’s cultural influence on the outside world diminished.

The Indosphere is still with us in many ways, however. In Dalrymple’s reckoning, “Over half of the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant.” But that’s not the extent of it.

It is thanks to Indian mathematicians that we have the decimal system and ten-digit, zero-to-nine counting that revolutionized higher mathematics, banking, and accounting worldwide. Indian astronomers calculated Earth’s spherical shape many centuries before Columbus ostensibly proved that the world is round. Chess — both the board game and the symbol for strategy — is of Indian derivation. And Buddhism remains a major religion across Asia.

All this raises the question of why ancient Indian history has been so roundly forgotten. A lack of evidence is not the problem; Dalrymple uses as support of his thesis an abundance of tangible remains — Buddhist and Hindu temples, place names, murals, and sculptures, various texts, buried coins, and more — from the Red Sea to Indonesia.

One explanation is mythologizing by China, which “has become very good at telling the story that it was always the center of the Asian world.” In particular, it has parlayed the legend of the “Silk Road” into a gospel-like depiction of itself as the preeminent player in East-West trade throughout history. Another factor is British colonizers, who devalued and misrepresented Indian history, culture, and science to justify their “civilizing mission” to the Subcontinent.

Dalrymple makes his case through both exemplary scholarship and compelling storytelling. The reader will feel transported through time and space when he describes, for example, the 1819 discovery by British officers of the Ajanta caves (the stunning earliest surviving graphic depiction of the Buddha’s world), or when he recounts the blood-soaked tale of the only female Chinese emperor (a force for the spread of Buddhism in China) in history.

If the book has a downside, it is the overwhelming detail — the myriad place names, strains of Buddhism and depictions of Buddha, structural variations between Buddhist and Hindu temples, and the abundance of key figures — that can make the reader feel swamped.

Photographs and maps are of some help in keeping the details straight, although an all-too-brief “Golden Road Glossary” in the back of the book could’ve been expanded and placed more prominently. A list of “Golden Road Dramatis Personae” might also have been useful.

These are very minor criticisms, however, when ranged against the significance of Dalrymple’s accomplishment in not only weaving together a complex story that transcends regional and topical divides, but in making us understand why it mattered then and now. In so doing, he challenges us to look at ancient India — and the entire world — in a whole new light.

[Editor’s note: This review originally ran in 2025.]

Elizabeth J. Moore is a freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. She was a longtime senior analyst and instructor who worked in the Defense, State, and Treasury departments, on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s President’s Daily Brief staff, and at the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency. She holds a master’s degree in international politics from American University.

About the book:

In the late 1970s, Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, marries Salma, a Lebanese refugee escaping the war in Beirut. Resolving to start over for the very last time, the couple opens a corner store in Toledo, Ohio, across from the General Motors factory, where Toledo’s Arab community intermingles with the working class. Over the decades, whether it’s bigotry (pre- and post-9/11), financial ruin, or terminal illness, the Idilbis find themselves on life’s outskirts, attempting to build something new.

Achingly poignant and slyly funny, the linked stories in Carryout follow the Idilbis and their children as they teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Walid, the youngest child of Ziad and Salma, navigates the heartbreaks of youth as well as the colorful characters who haunt his parents’ corner store. As he grows up into a writer, Walid’s gaze fixes on his father and the long shadow of displacement and occupation. Mustafa, the eldest son, is forever trying to outrun the disasters that seem to seek him out, while Nawal, the only daughter, is dumped by a friend and hatches a scheme to win her back. Unsure whether to run toward each other or away from each other, the characters in Dudar’s exquisite debut suffer the absurdities and indignities of life in America with wry obstinance and striking wisdom.

Hosted by Lost City Books, 2467 18th St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

All Us Saints: A Novel by Katherine Packert Burke (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Marcie Geffner. “Katherine Packert Burke’s contemporary gothic novel, All Us Saints, portrays the tormented lives of four adult siblings almost two decades after three teenaged girls were killed inside their home. With a large cast of dramatis personae and a minimalistic plot, the author relies on a theatrical, locked-room structure, creepy images, and themes related to gender, sexuality, and violence to hold the story together.”

No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, edited by Jenny Bartoy (Catapult). Reviewed by Laura Fisher Kaiser. “The circumstances run the gamut from untreated mental illness and addiction to abandonment and (particularly within immigrant families) cultural alienation. Every scenario is heartbreaking, even in cases of existential threat. But once they go no-contact, there is little ambivalence. Indeed, there is clarity, although it doesn’t make things any easier.”

Men Like Ours: A Novel by Bindu Bansinath (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Patricia S. Gormley. “While Bansinath alternates among many voices, the most important belong to women — both in the collective first-person-plural prologue and in the omniscient narrator’s relating of group conversations. That prologue is a master class in stage-setting: In it, the women describe the divisions and expectations in both gender and cultural norms. The titular men are hypocritical, lazy, careless, uninterested, and reliant on the women to do everything from keeping Desi culture alive to raising the children. It is visceral, cutting, and as sharply observed as anything by Jane Austen (if Austen had chosen to concern herself with oral sex).”

Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett (Harper). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “As a sentimental examination of life and family, Whistler succeeds. Crisp prose and a halcyon plot driven by peaceful people exert the force of a steady breeze that never slams the shutters closed. Conflict and challenging situations very much exist here and are addressed head on — sometimes with resolution, but often (just like in real life) with acceptance. This is a contemplative book that will leave readers in a warm, speculative daydream.”

Don’t miss another excellent book review, author interview, or feature! Subscribe to our free newsletter and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Advertise with us here.

What would you do if you were the last human on Earth? This is the situation Nick Hindman finds himself in as he and his team of scientists work to save our species from extinction. Their plan has a name, “the Afterlife Project,” and it involves sending Nick far into the future — 10,000 years ahead — to find a way, against seemingly insurmountable odds, to repopulate the planet.

On a long-ago evening while Daphne’s sister lay in a hospital bed recovering from an appendectomy, Eddie took Daphne on a stargazing drive with the headlights turned off to maximize visibility. They missed a turn and careened off the road, Eddie severely injuring his ankle and Daphne cutting her head. The most lasting damage, though, came from Daphne’s mother, Abigail, who declared Eddie could not be trusted with the children and divorced him. This marriage of less than two years ended, but Whistler reveals the small, powerful ways in which Eddie’s and Daphne’s “hearts were forever stitched together.”

Thus, their chance meeting rekindles a past relationship that become deeply meaningful through the benefit of age and wisdom. Daphne had three father figures in her life, and they float into the story like Dickens’ Christmas ghosts. Her biological father, a selfish man, abandoned his family in favor of the sea. Daphne’s recent stepfather, Lucas, stayed with Abigail for the remainder of her life, but Daphne and he were never close. It was Eddie’s departure under unfortunate circumstances — and the peeling away of the layers surrounding it — that form the central plot of Whistler.

The reunited Eddie and Daphne warm to each other gradually, their shifting dynamic captured through tender scenes. With time, they even brave another car ride together, Eddie now calling himself a tripod because he relies on a cane as Daphne drives him to the hospital for an appointment:

The day was hot and bright, and it seemed almost funny to remember how cold we’d been. How alone. Forty-five years later we were stuck in traffic on the FDR, watching the boats slicing their way up the East River.

The sunny waiting room was crowded. In some cases you didn’t know who was the patient and who was coming along for the ride, but then there were people who looked like they were assembled from a bone kit, translucent and bald in their wheelchairs, their sock hats pulled low against the air-conditioner’s chill.

Daphne tells the story in first-person narration but riveting third-person flashbacks to 1980 appear throughout. After the accident, Eddie and Daphne spent a freezing night trapped in the wrecked car scrounging for blankets and food; she remembers it as the happiest she’d ever been. While awaiting rescue, Eddie tells Daphne about a book proposal he recently received. It’s about a horse named Whistler dramatically throwing a Wyoming rancher to the ground. As the rancher clings to life, she floats in a near-death reverie and is visited by key figures from her past. She survives only because the horse returns to save her.

This may not have been the best anecdote for Eddie to recount while he and his stepdaughter were themselves in an incredibly dangerous situation, but his attempt to lighten the mood was pure.

Patchett has published successful novels since the early 1990s, and her 2001 breakout, Bel Canto, named one of the best books of the century by the New York Times, cemented her firmly atop the literary landscape. Her books often feature genial, thoughtful characters, and the lack of hostility in her work can be mistaken for an absence of tension. While many contemporary authors obsess over raising their characters’ stakes to fuel momentum, Patchett builds significance in a smoother, often more effective, way.

As a sentimental examination of life and family, Whistler succeeds. Crisp prose and a halcyon plot driven by peaceful people exert the force of a steady breeze that never slams the shutters closed. Conflict and challenging situations very much exist here and are addressed head on — sometimes with resolution, but often (just like in real life) with acceptance. This is a contemplative book that will leave readers in a warm, speculative daydream.

Ryan Davison, Ph.D., is a writer and literary critic residing in Portugal and the U.S. He has contributed to the Malahat Review, the Independent, Open Letters Review, Edelweiss+, and NetGalley. Ryan’s blurbs are often cited by LitHub’s Book Marks, the popular book-review aggregator. Along with literary criticism of traditional and independently published works, Ryan holds a doctorate in neuroscience and authors scientific papers.

It is the quiet consistency of his mannerisms that makes the series so charming. Cross plies his trade — solving homicides — across multiple volumes named for the respective victim’s profession (e.g., The Cyclist, The Bookseller, The Monk, and so on).

Above all else, the books are engrossing police procedurals featuring Cross’ gay father, Raymond, and his colleague-in-arms, Josie Ottey, a Black single mother of two. There is also a full cast of supporting characters (not least the murder victims), including Alice Mackenzie, who starts out as a police staff investigator, and latecomer Michael Swift, who becomes Alice’s live-in boyfriend.

I’ve been to Brighton — site of a Conservative Party conference — which is near where a good friend was born. It’s a beach town in Essex on the southern shore of England, not that far from where Cross does his sleuthing. (Of course, no place in Britain is “far” by American standards.)

I have now read every DS George Cross investigation I could get my hands on. The series resonates with me so much that I wonder if I, too, am on the spectrum. (I’m not.) On the other hand, the Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid, also loves the series and describes it as iconic. And it’s well written, too.

Darrell Delamaide is the author of two novels and two books of nonfiction. He lives in Washington, DC.

In the sectioned prose poem “Blockbuster Fever,” the reader experiences not only the collective euphoria of what cinema has meant to the speaker’s family, but also the verve and vigor of Quiñones’ voice:

“That unforgettable summer, Papi, Grandma, Celeste, and I went to see White Chicks at the American Theater and our chests shook like manhole covers, and our hips bent the red cushioned seats into the linchpin of laughter…”

The poem goes on to chart that moment as prying open the aperture of repressed grief over a lost loved one. A public family ritual made of unbounded expression — a kind of New Orleans second line writ small and bounded to the “line” of movie-theater seats.

The next poem, “You Sang to Me,” takes on the signifiers of learning to dance salsa, while also paying homage to the singer Marc Anthony. Cleverly, the poem visually obscures the lyrics to one of his songs with black footprints, both creating a sense of stepping on the beat or learning the steps, while also solving (quite ingeniously) a copyright conundrum that often plagues poets who want to use lyrics in their work. These types of creative presentations and solutions demonstrate how Orange centers maturity as a vector for revelation.

Maturity also appears in the book’s prismatic approach to form. There are new forms — like the duplex, invented by Jericho Brown and showcased in Quiñones’ poem “Divorce” — but also visual poems in the form of maps, poems that nod toward the color wheel and color theory, a chessboard poem, a QR-code poem, erasures, a poem in the form of a Monopoly board, and a ghazal (with “orange” as the chanted word). Again and again, a relentless curiosity is lifted up as the narrative orbits the poems’ speakers’ understanding of sexual desire, queer identity, family mythos, abandonment, and so much more.

“Is love measured by duration or depth?” the poem “Marriage” asks of itself and of us. The entire collection, in fact, turns that question inward and outward at once, moving beyond Quiñones’ autobiographical specifics to become an ars poetica prompt: Is a poem’s love measured by duration or depth?

Quiñones seems to be keenly aware of the multiple traditions their poems inhabit, and through this awareness, we readers are brought into the cinema of tenderness. Orange ends with the line, “I develop in the light,” which concludes the poem “Beyond Orange.” What is true for the poem’s speaker is also true for the reader. One will be moved, developed, and seen. And isn’t that ultimately the kind of blessing a poet wants their work to bestow?

Steven Leyva’s latest poetry collection is The Opposite of Cruelty.

The mysterious death of neighborhood fixture Matthew Pillai — and the subsequent investigation into it — forms the scaffolding of Men Like Ours, Bansinath’s decades-spanning debut novel. The Sharma family sits at the center of the investigation: Ashok, a meek and unambitious chemist; his much younger and bitter wife, Anita, who has a degree in software engineering; and their American-born daughter, Leila (described in the book’s index as “a tart”). Another significant character is Leila’s best friend, Riya (who’s definitely not a tart).

While Bansinath alternates among many voices, the most important belong to women — both in the collective first-person-plural prologue and in the omniscient narrator’s relating of group conversations. That prologue is a master class in stage-setting: In it, the women describe the divisions and expectations in both gender and cultural norms. The titular men are hypocritical, lazy, careless, uninterested, and reliant on the women to do everything from keeping Desi culture alive to raising the children. It is visceral, cutting, and as sharply observed as anything by Jane Austen (if Austen had chosen to concern herself with oral sex).

Whenever the narrative drops us in on the women, we see them discussing the events of the story with each other, which gradually fills in the pieces of the police inquiry:

“The officers collected the women’s testimonies, which came together slowly, part gossip and part fact, inconsistent as a stream of old frying oil.”

This piecemeal accumulation of details allows readers to consider different versions of the truth — “Of course that’s what happened” — giving us a critical advantage over the cops. We get to see the story taking shape, the pieces slotting into place. It’s an exceptional experience.

Naturally, since this tightknit community shares everything from recipes to chitchat about favorite TV shows, its trauma — and the subsequent competitive bickering over whose is worse — is also communal. Any child of immigrants is likely familiar with their elders’ tendency to portray their own sacrifices as having been so substantial as to render them immune from criticism, and the places where this phenomenon is pointed out are among the book’s funniest.

This is especially true whenever anyone argues with Anita: Eventually, each party insists they should die to end the suffering (presumably, of everyone). At one point, after a heated exchange, Anita disgustedly wipes “the smell of feet cheese from her forehead.” 

Despite the humor, the novel is imbued with a sense of dread, an oily slickness. We see the missed communications, the bitterness, the assumptions, and the loneliness that allow predators and abusers to operate and the concerns of women to be dismissed. Even the police demonstrate racism and misogyny, which is infuriating but believable. It isn’t until the end that the women realize it’s up to them to repair the fissures.

The “men like ours” don’t show up as a collective point-of-view character until nearly a hundred pages in. When they finally arrive, they do little more than highlight their own hubris, asking:

“How could wives bear witness? What could they have seen, with their cartoonish sloe eyes, that the men had not seen better? Why was no-one questioning [us]?”

Of course, all along, the women do far more than merely bear witness to history. They speak it into being, preserving their culture and protecting its future in the process.

Patricia S. Gormley lives in Northern Virginia with her librarian husband and four small, mysterious beings who profess to be cats but who behave like permanently disgruntled toddlers with no verbal skills.

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No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, an anthology edited by Jenny Bartoy, offers valuable perspective. In it, we hear from 32 writers, including Michelle Dowd, Stephanie Foo, Nick Flynn, and Cheryl Strayed, most of whom have initiated estrangement in one form or another. That is, they made the deliberate and difficult decision to erect an invisible, deadening wall between themselves and a relative who treated them abominably.

The circumstances run the gamut from untreated mental illness and addiction to abandonment and (particularly within immigrant families) cultural alienation. Every scenario is heartbreaking, even in cases of existential threat. But once they go no-contact, there is little ambivalence. Indeed, there is clarity, although it doesn’t make things any easier.

What family has not had its share of Tolstoyan unhappiness? You might hear about some relatives who’ve “gotten into a snit,” as my mother would say, forcing everyone else to walk on eggshells. Or siblings who’ve been waging the same battle since childhood. Family tiffs have existed since ancient times, but sometimes they serve as proxy wars for deeper transgressions that nobody dares name (e.g., abuse, mindfuckery, money, religiosity, etc.). When those problems go unresolved, they become a tinderbox.

None of the writers in this book have gone scorched-earth on a whim. Their weighty decisions come as a last resort, often after years of abuse or betrayal (often at the hands of parents). Judging from this curation, there are a lot of people out there who have absolutely no business procreating. They’re not just crappy parents, they’re monsters. Even so, eradicating them from one’s life can feel unnatural. As Bartoy asks in her introduction:

“Who are we without our family? What kind of person cuts the proverbial umbilical cord and why? And who do we become once separated from our kin?”

Yet, when each of these narrators found themselves at a perilous tipping point, the only way to maintain their dignity and sanity was to cut ties completely and irrevocably. Part of the process entails — presumably with the help of a therapist — learning to identify and name toxic behaviors and stop normalizing them.

In this genre, pop-psychology jargon is almost unavoidable, but the writers here keep it real, deploying clinical phrases just enough to be useful to readers struggling with their own predicaments. A couple of entries could stand to be shorter, but that’s a delicate task for any editor, and even more so with such soul-baring material. It would be like your therapist cueing the Oscar-playoff music.

I applaud Bartoy’s decision to intersperse first-person essays with occasional poetry and experimental pieces. The poems do some impressive heavy lifting, processing trauma without sugarcoating it. “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” Lorne Daniel’s five-stanza tearjerker about a son’s battle with drugs, begins with an epigram by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.”

Indeed, some families have no idea they’re straddling a San Andreas-size fault until the Big One strikes. I struggled at first with the odd syntax of Gabriella Denise Frank’s “ESTR NGEMENT” until I read her author’s note, which explains that it’s a lipogram, a literary constraint that excludes one or more letters. Go back, read again, and sure enough, she has managed to write an entire essay without using the letter “A,” an exercise that conveys “what’s estranged for me: father, dad, and family.” The form becomes the message.

Estrangement is a conscious rupture of family bonds. It requires tremendous resolve to keep it up, especially if the relative refuses to acknowledge the new terms or is incapable of doing so, or if duty calls. In Soni Brown’s poignant “Wash Belly,” the narrator realizes she has become a stranger to her native culture in Jamaica while caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s and has become a stranger to herself. 

I found “Together” by native Washingtonian Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore particularly jarring. The writer recalls returning to DC to promote her memoir, Touching the Art, about her relationship with her grandmother, an abstract artist. But as Sycamore is walking to Politics and Prose Bookstore to give a reading — a coup for any author — she finds herself bombarded by painful flashbacks to her father’s sexual abuse of her as a child. Thinking about the other adults in her orbit who failed to acknowledge the horror hiding in plain sight, she feels gutted by a fresh sense of betrayal. The reader, too, is prompted to reflect on the role of bystanders or, more accurately, their own role in the concatenations that lead to estrangement.  

There is always, of course, another side to the story. “Dichotomy of the Rejected” by Geneva Phillips tells what it’s like to be the one iced out. She lost custody of her young children because of her own substance abuse and incarceration. More than a decade later, she’s still trying to make sense of it all — her mistakes, her remorse, her yearning to see her grown babies. “‘Why’ is equivalent to running circles on a sheet of nails,” she says. She’s learned to compartmentalize her pain, and one senses that she hopes her children, wherever they are, read her essay so they can know she understands why they want nothing to do with her. Her reckoning feels relentless, and she acknowledges that she’ll probably never hear from them again. “And yet,” she writes, “and yet.”

That Bartoy chose Phillips as one of her closers speaks to the human tragedy contained in these pages. After reading so many variations on the theme, we don’t have to hear from Phillips’ children to comprehend their reasons. Because family estrangement so defies the natural order, it follows that everyone affected — the aggrieved, the ghosted, and everybody on the sidelines — prays for some kind of rapprochement.

It can happen. I’ve known family members to bury the hatchet, much to everyone’s relief. But as this nuanced collection makes abundantly clear, severing all connection can sometimes be the healthiest choice of all.

Laura Fisher Kaiser lives in Washington, DC, and is writing a biography of “lost lady of lit” Elizabeth Dejeans (1868-1928), who was also her lost cousin because of family estrangement.

Pinsker discussed Boss Lincoln with author/attorney Talmage Boston last week. Listen to the podcast here.

On the evening of May 31, 2011, Calla St. Cloud, a creatively blocked New York playwright, her younger brother, James, a video-store clerk, and James’ girlfriend, Heather, arrive at the St. Cloud home in a small town in Virginia. The place is owned by Calla and James’ elder sister, Edna, a local photographer whose career has stalled. The other occupants are Edna’s husband, Roger, author of Doll Parts: Isolation, Transvestism, and the St. Cloud Family Murders, a true-crime book about the tragedy, and their daughter, Wren.

Shut inside the house, the family extinguishes lit candles one by one while Roger reads a script that reenacts the horrific events that occurred on the same night 19 years earlier. That was when Edna’s twin, Roland, stabbed her friends to death and then turned the knife on her, at which point she extracted it from her chest and stabbed him back:

“When she met Roland at the top of the basement steps, it was like they’d made a trade. He in her makeup, her dress; she with the knife he’d taken from the kitchen. And for a moment she thought: Is this who I am too? Is this the closeness of twinship? But that worry did not keep her from stabbing him. She went to the hospital, he went to the psych ward, and she forgot the feeling.”

Once the evening’s ritual is set in motion, the participants stay awake all night. Edna looks at infamous photos she took of herself and her wounds after the murders. Roger interviews his latest subject (and sexual conquest) about a different crime that occurred in California. Calla teaches Wren how to play a virtual city-building game. And James discusses his confusion about his sexuality with Calla and Heather and rewatches “Dollmaker,” a film inspired by the killings. Nobody enters Roland’s bedroom, which has been bricked up since the massacre.

Thus concludes Act I.

In Act II, the ritual is repeated one year later. The night’s activities are similar, except that Roger is now absent and Calla’s manipulative lover, Sarah, has sneaked into the house without Edna’s knowledge or permission.

Acts I and II are divided by an “Intermission,” in which “The Monster,” via a manifesto, reveals the details of an unhappy childhood and troubled adolescence involving gender dysphoria, mistreatment by a mentor, and emotional abuse and sexual assault by one of Edna’s friends, Beatrice.

“My parents hang my sister’s portraits around the house,” the Monster writes. “When they catch me, some midnight, clumsily scratching out my own face (pen squeaking over the glass; the photo beneath unbothered) they think it mere jealousy. I believe that’s when they know there is something wrong with me. My mother is pregnant with our younger sister a few months later.”

It’s not entirely clear that Roland wrote those words because Roger fabricated quotes from Roland’s diary, which never existed. Still, the confession feels authentic. In a subversive twist, “The Monster” may be the most sympathetic of the four siblings.

Also in the manifesto, Beatrice taunts Roland:

You’re pathetic, she says. There’s no world for people like you. There’s nothing for you. At least in Hell you’ll be with your own kind. At least when you’re dead —

There are no words left. No time to tell her that I agree and I long for it. That in death, some divine watchman will tell me whether I was saint or monster. That I will know at last how we all measure up.

There are no words. There is my knife in her eye, pushed back, back, back.

Edna is the novel’s linchpin and may be just as unhinged as her homicidal twin. The ritual, which she tightly controls, is bizarre and gruesome. Her decision to remain in the house where she was both a survivor and the perpetrator of a brutal attack (and where the St. Cloud parents later died in suspicious circumstances) is peculiar at best and deranged at worst.

The final scene, in which Edna shows her true nature, is short, violent, and incomprehensible. What it means, if anything, isn’t explained. Even so, readers captivated by true crime, dysfunctional families, and slow burns may be drawn to this dark domestic drama.

Marcie Geffner is a journalist, essayist, and book reviewer in Ventura, California.

Dealing, as it does, with the highs and lows of Jamison’s manic depression (now called bipolar disorder, which I also am diagnosed with), I was worried it might be triggering or upsetting if I cracked it open while in the wrong frame of mind.

But, in a recent period of stability, I started reading Jamison’s memoir — a decision that, like so many of my moods, turned out to be a double-edged sword. “The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you must first make it beautiful,” she writes. “In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness…In order to contend with it, I first had to know it in all of its moods and infinite disguises, understand its real and imagined powers.”

She calls the illness “a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.” Indeed, for reasons unrelated to the book, I soon found myself once again grappling with a deep downward spiral, one of bipolar disorder’s dangerous distillations. Jamison’s words, much like the illness itself, were both pain and balm as I saw how some of her experiences ran parallel to mine.

“The morbidity of my mind was astonishing: Death and its kin were constant companions,” she reflects. “My memory always took the black line of the mind’s underground system; thoughts would go from one tormented moment of my past to the next.”

As someone who spends too much time rehashing meaningless interactions during which I fear I’ve blundered irrevocably — and, ironically, too much time trying to break that habit — I felt in complete sympathy with Jamison here. And although I’ve largely managed to relegate “death and its kin” to acquaintances rather than constant companions, macabre thoughts still knock on my mind’s door far more often than I’d like.

And yet, also like Jamison, I’ve learned to coexist with this illness that is part of my inheritance. My father, like the author’s father, grapples with unpredictable moods; my mother, like Jamison’s, has always been a steadying presence:

“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and…she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.”

Some days, it’s more difficult than others to turn the beast (let alone myself) toward the sun. Yet it’s true that, like Jamison, I am discovering things that make it easier. Recounting the time she confided in a loved one about her illness, she writes:

“David could not have been kinder or more accepting; he asked me question after question about what I had been through, what had been most terrible, what had frightened me the most, and what he could do to help me when I was ill. Somehow, after that conversation, everything became easier for me: I felt, for the first time, that I was not alone in dealing with all of the pain and uncertainty.”

To my great fortune, I’ve had not just one but many people react this way: with support, with kindness, with patience, and with love. It is this love on which I draw during periods of instability like now — love, coupled with the knowledge (culled from miserable experience) that this, too, shall pass. As Jamison phrases it:

“My high moods and hopes, having ridden briefly in the top car of the Ferris wheel will, as suddenly as they came, plummet into a black and gray and tired heap. Time will pass; these moods will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.”

The trick is finding a way to live, as peacefully as possible, in all three states: the carnival, the charnel house, and the brief calm in between.

Mariko Hewer is a freelance editor and writer, as well as a nursery-school teacher. She is passionate about good books, good food, and good company.

The entire show revels in the former first lady’s unwitting modern status as a gay icon, portraying her as an alcoholic who longs to perform. Mary — once dismissed as the emotional albatross of our greatest president — is now camp. The show is factually baseless but aesthetically seizes on the characteristics that made the woman both charming and despised.

As Lois Romano summarizes in An Inconvenient Widow, her new biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, “She was a larger-than-life, provocative character who spent too freely, grieved too publicly and for too long, and seemed unable or unwilling to corral her emotions, her temper, and her opinions.” No wonder she continues to attract imitation and interpretation.

Romano’s book presents a woman buffeted by history but unable to garner lasting sympathy. The author’s choice of the “inconvenient” descriptor deftly defines much of Mary’s public persona, particularly in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. The biography is vivid if uneven in its execution, attempting to rescue Mary from 150 years of invective while also revealing her to be “histrionic, self-focused, strong-willed, and impulsive, sometimes irrational, even dishonest at times.”

To be blunt, the Mary Todd Lincoln of this biography is sometimes unlikable. Yet, she was also subject to forces she could not hope to overcome. Mary was “too needy [and] too ready to lash out,” writes Romano, which makes it difficult to disentangle the patriarchal and sexist characterizations from those that are more reasonable. While she was, after Lincoln’s death, at the financial mercy of others, when Mary finally received a portion of her late husband’s salary — $22,000 after taxes — she immediately bought a house in Chicago. Within a year, she was unable to support herself and was forced to rent out the home and auction the furniture.

Another writer might’ve worked to more fully unravel those overlapping and intersecting threads — the cultural and the personal — but Romano tends to err on the side of Mary. In the face of decades of withering historiography, Romano’s protectiveness of her subject and recuperative aims are admirable, but they ultimately continue to paint a skewed portrait of a complicated human being.

Similarly, Romano too often declares Mary’s motivations without enough basis in fact. Even when there is ample historical evidence, it’s impossible to truly know the internal state of a given figure. Near the end of the Civil War, for example, the Lincolns and their son Tad visit General Ulysses S. Grant outside Richmond, the Confederate Capitol. When “the young spirited wife” of another general is permitted to ride next to Lincoln while Mary and Grant’s wife follow in a carriage, Mary responds with “inexplicable rage,” yelling at the woman when she stops to pay her respects to the president’s wife. “[A]s was often the case with Mary,” Romano aptly writes, “a swirl of emotions lay beneath the surface.”

But then the biographer pushes past what we are able to know, adding, “She derived her confidence from always being by her husband’s side in public situations. When she felt diminished, she was prone to lashing out. Her need for control, for status, was stronger than her need for approval.”

It is a charge Romano herself directs at William Herndon, Lincoln’s one-time law partner and an ongoing, sometimes quite public, opponent of Mary. In one of the talks Herndon gave about Lincoln’s life, he describes the commander-in-chief’s mental breakdown in 1841 as coming from the dread of spending a life with Mary that he termed Lincoln’s “nightmare,” a sentiment, Romano retorts, “which [Herndon] had no way of knowing.”

Still, An Inconvenient Widow is entertaining and informative, bookended by detailed descriptions of Mary’s “insanity trial” in 1875. Here, Romano’s rehabilitative approach is justified. Weaving together the broad and the specific, she writes:

“Mary’s three-hour trial had all the stereotypical overtones of the era: the misogynistic view of women as the weaker, more hysterical, and less intelligent sex, coupled with a lack of knowledge about mental health.”

The proceedings included testimony from hotel clerks and shopkeepers, though the main witness was Mary’s only surviving son, Robert. The jury didn’t spend much time deliberating, and Mary was ordered to an asylum outside Chicago. That she allegedly attempted to buy lethal doses of laudanum that same evening only seemed to confirm the charges against her. She would spend the rest of her life rootless and under a perpetual microscope.

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, there’s an exhibit of clothing worn by first ladies. The garments are material reminders that these were real people who lived, experienced the world, and left their names to posterity. Mary’s purple velvet ensemble with white satin trim and mother-of-pearl buttons was likely made by Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who became one of Mary’s closest confidantes.

For playwright Escola and countless others, Mary is like the gown: merely a vehicle for performance, a persona to inhabit. Where Romano succeeds in An Inconvenient Widow is by revealing a charming, maddening woman who seemed to lose a bit more of herself after each personal tragedy. It’s a testament to Romano’s corralling of a vast life into a readable volume that Mary Todd Lincoln, in all her complexity, still reads as a tragic figure worthy of historical reconsideration and maybe a little grace.

Justin H. Thompson studied English literature. He lives and works in Washington, DC.

In the author’s note at the beginning of his new book, Tom McAllister explains how the quirky project came to be: After having two novels come out within 13 months of each other — and then attending to the requisite promotional activities and events — he found himself tired and writing very little. When a former student happened to email him, asking how to get over writer’s block, he responded with “the usual advice,” then added, “sometimes it helps to give yourself arbitrary restraints. Simplify the task by eliminating some of the variables.”

In Leslie Gray Streeter’s captivating Family & Other Calamities, the travails of entertainment journalist Dawn Roberts invite comparison to the epic plight of Edmond Dantès.

Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press). Reviewed by William Rice. “Readers seeking lighthearted nostalgia about shoulder pads and suspenders should look elsewhere. This book is an indictment, and the charges include murder: Deadly fires were used to dislodge working-class, usually Black or Latino families from rent-controlled buildings that could be rented or sold at market rates to yuppies. The author chillingly reports that between 1978 and 1983, in nearby Hoboken, New Jersey — just across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan — arson ‘killed fifty-six people and left more than eight thousand homeless.’”

Accumulation: A Novel by Aimee Pokwatka (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). Reviewed by Sarah M. Lawrence. “Tenn and her family — husband Ward and children Aisling and Anders — have just moved from North Carolina to New York for Ward’s new high-paying, serious job. As a token of love, he buys his wife her dream house. But as they settle in, weird things begin occurring: A random doll appears in the yard, the faucet keeps turning on, and the kids act strangely.”

To See Beyond: Essays by Anna Badkhen (Bellevue Literary Press). Reviewed by Sara Polsky. “Her essays call for a widening of the scales at which we think about seemingly contemporary problems. They are global, ancient, and impactful beyond regional or national boundaries, and solving them will require a return to — or a renewed awareness of — traditional practices and forgotten folklore. For Badkhen, who was raised outside of faith, that has even come to include prayer, which can ‘extend ourselves outside of our dailyness, to restructure our seeing and listening.’”

Questions 27 & 28: A Novel by Karen Tei Yamashita (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by David A. Taylor. “The narrative in Questions 27 & 28 centers on the period from 1942 through 1945, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a WWII executive order authorizing the uprooting of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and detention in an archipelago of hastily built camps. (For generations, these were called ‘internment camps’; many now consider ‘concentration camps’ more accurate.) The story reaches backward and forward across decades, but to call it a novel about the camps is like saying Ulysses is a novel about a day in British-held Dublin.”

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Oops...That’s Illegal! A Handbook for the Wildly Curious (and the Accidental Outlaw) by Mike Mandell (June 16th, Balance, 256 pp.). There are laws against many things you’d never imagine, and you’ll surely break some this summer. Cops and judges will tell you ignorance is no excuse, so read Oops to learn if lying on your dating profile is illegal or if it’s okay to do a U-turn when you spot a DUI checkpoint.

Waves of Burden by Curtis Ippolito (June 24th, Rock and a Hard Place Press, 332 pp.). Drew Jones has put the bad old days as a foster kid behind him. Now, he’s got a wife, a business, and a baby on the way. But when a long-ago friend resurfaces and exposes Drew to San Diego’s seamy underbelly, he’s forced to reckon with what it means to be loyal to both his families: the one from the past and the one in the present.

Man Overboard!: A Novel by Kathleen Rooney (July 7th, Gallery Books, 208 pp.). Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick  doesn’t like bobbing in the ocean and isn’t quite sure how he ended up there. (Did he fall off the ship?) But while treading water and hoping for rescue, he has many hours to consider how the cruise with his extended family went awry. 

Generation F*cked: How Millennials and Gen Z Were Robbed of the American Dream and How We Can Fix Our Futures by Freddie Smith (July 14th, BenBella Books, 264 pp.). It seems like so many younger folks are unable to achieve the same financial success as their parents. When did things go sideways, and how can we change course?

Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures Into the Unknown by Roberta Kwok (July 21st, Sourcebooks, 368 pp.). Science is all about experimenting to see how and why things tick under various conditions. Sometimes, doing so requires researchers to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of making important discoveries.

Undesirable: Invasive Species, Humans, and Where We All Belong by Amy Crawford (Aug. 3rd, Oxford University Press, 288 pp.). Should you stomp, with extreme prejudice, those spotted lanternflies that are ruining local vineyards? Probably. But our ways of dealing with invasive species can often create new problems. (Ask Australians about cane toads, which were introduced to control the beetles destroying sugar crops.)

Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Aug. 4th, Penguin Press, 384 pp.). Shout “Day-O” in a crowded place, and you’re likely to hear it back, but making Caribbean music cool decades before Jimmy Buffett was just one of Harry Belafonte’s accomplishments. He was a movie and TV star and an activist whose friends ranged from Fidel Castro to Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King Jr.

Fret: A Novel by Nadia Bozak (Aug. 25th, ECW Press, 256 pp.). It’s been years since Kate enjoyed a bit of fame as part of an indie-rock duo with her little sister. But the music stopped, and she’s now a struggling single mother of two. Then, things get much worse: Her car is stolen with her daughter still inside.

Reality TV for Snobs: Everything You Need to Know About the Shows You’re Too Intellectual to Watch by Ali Barthwell (Aug. 25th, Quirk Books, 256 pp.). Too highfalutin to binge “Survivor” or check in with the “Real Housewives”? Sure you are. But even if you do cop to loving a good reality show, who’s got time to keep track of them all? Author Ali Barthwell, that’s who.

Erratica: On Climbing, Language, and Touching Stone by Brian Laidlaw (Sept. 8th, Milkweed Editions, 232 pp.). Conquering California’s El Capitan left author Brian Laidlaw humbled, awed, and utterly at a loss for words to describe the experience of ascending Earth’s most formidable heights. Erratica is his attempt to find them.

The Perilous Fight by Colin Kaepernick (Sept. 15th, Legacy Lit, 288 pp.). He was a Super Bowl quarterback who’d grown increasingly disillusioned with the NFL’s exploitation of Black people. Taking a knee during the National Anthem before a game was a calculated protest that effectively ended Colin Kaepernick’s career but also drew unparalled attention to the issue both on the field and off.

The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch by Genevieve Plunkett (Sept. 15th, Amethyst Editions, 296 pp.). It’s 2005, and hapless twentysomething Drew heads to Vermont for a job. She always assumed she was straight, but one look at the alluring, much-older Cleo ignites a queer romance that leaves both women — and half the town — reeling.  

Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz; translated by Mark Polizzotti (Sept. 15th, Archipelago, 64 pp.). In this “genre-defying meditation,” author Echenoz lovingly (and wittily) reflects on his working relationship with his longtime editor, Jérôme Lindon, founder of Les Editions de Minuit.

The narrative in Questions 27 & 28 centers on the period from 1942 through 1945, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a WWII executive order authorizing the uprooting of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and detention in an archipelago of hastily built camps. (For generations, these were called “internment camps”; many now consider “concentration camps” more accurate.) The story reaches backward and forward across decades, but to call it a novel about the camps is like saying Ulysses is a novel about a day in British-held Dublin.

An author’s note nods to Lane Hirabashi, the writer who introduced Yamashita to hundreds of boxes in the camps’ vast archive. The novel’s title refers to two queries on the form detainees needed to fill out in order to get released. The first asks if they — who have lost their freedom —are willing to serve in the U.S. military. The second asks if they renounce all allegiance to Japan (where most of them had never been). The answers cause generational faultlines that reverberate violently inside the barbed wire and beyond.

Characters roll through the narrative like files on carts, connected more by adjacent experiences than by direct interaction. Many passages reference true accounts; the author then shapes fact into fiction for dramatic coherence. (The book includes a bibliography for each section so that readers can pursue those threads.)

Near the midpoint, for example, in a chapter titled “Miné: Citizen,” we meet a young artist, Miné, in conversation with a photographer. As they walk through the desert examining petroglyphs, she sketches him. The real-life Miné Okubo was in her 20s when she and her family were sent to the Topaz camp in the Utah desert. Detainees were rarely allowed to photograph their inhumane conditions, but she drew hundreds of vivid sketches that bore witness. After the war, she pulled them together and published an early graphic memoir before that genre existed. She called it Citizen 13660, the inmate number the government had assigned her. It was later republished and entered as testimony in California’s hearings on reparations.

Miné is fascinating, and I watched for her to reappear beyond her initial few pages. Unfortunately, she never did (except in the book’s endnotes). Yamashita’s range of characters is as rich as James Joyce’s in Ulysses, but in a novel that seems determined to build emotional momentum, the decision to pull some of the liveliest characters off stage so quickly felt like a shame.

Still, I dog-eared many pages so that I could return to them. Some include chilling exchanges, like one involving an arrest after a false accusation. The detained man asks the police to tell his family where they’re taking him. “No, Harry, where you are going, nobody knows where you are going,” the officer responds. “I won’t tell nobody, and you will be there for a long time.” A footnote points to the quote’s presence in the Online Archive of California.

That archive may also hold the seeds of rapprochement. In an amazing scene, two dogged researchers from the present witness (as “future ghosts”) a 1942 gathering in which federal officials debate the legality of detainment. The subsequent internal wrangling at the Supreme Court, which ultimately approved the policy, might sound dry in lesser hands, but Yamashita fills it with tragic weight. As the researchers look on, Justice Robert Jackson utters his enduring — and damning — dissent:

“The Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim…”

In Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita has created a stunning indictment of the fallout from two loaded queries on an obscure, long-ago bureaucratic questionnaire. In the process, she brings the historical archive, in all its messiness, to life.

David A. Taylor’s books include Soul of a People, about the WPA writers, and Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II, which received an Independent Publishers Book Award for world history. He teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University and produces a history/culture podcast, “The People’s Recorder,” which received a 2025 Signal Award.

This event is free and open to the public, hosted in partnership with the Frederick County Public Library. For accessibility requests, email info@curiousiguana.com.

Hosted by Curious Iguana at the C. Burr Artz Public Library, 110 E. Patrick St., Frederick, MD. Learn more here.

The gracious white house appeared, anchored in a sloping green lawn with beds of bright geraniums. It felt like returning to the home of longtime friends, although I’d only been here a few times, only met our hosts four years earlier. But I’d been living in this house in my imagination for almost a decade, writing a novel set here. Today, incredibly, was the launch party for that book, Vanishing Point.

It all started with a visit to a rural art museum in the region. I fell in love with a landscape by a late 19th-century Pittsburgh artist previously unknown to me, George Hetzel, founder of the Scalp Level art colony. Intrigued, I began researching and discovered his turbulent, creative family. George died in 1899, not long after the family had moved from Pittsburgh to Somerset, to a house they called the Hetzel Studio.

His daughter, Lila, lived and painted in the studio until her death in 1967. Granddaughter Dorothy, a writer, remained there until she died in 1977. Fascinated by the creative and personal challenges faced by these women, I decided to make Lila and Dorothy my story’s primary characters. The Hetzel Studio was less than an hour from our home in Bedford County. I had to get inside.

My first attempt, on a snowy day in 2022, was a cold call in every way. I knocked; no one was home. Scribbling a note of explanation on the back of my card, I wedged it in the door jamb.

Ten days later, a text appeared: Hetzel House. Sorry. Note blew away. Found it. Just back from England.

That evening, “Hetzel House” (aka Michelle and Dan) called. Phone on speaker, I took notes. Michelle had grown up on the farm next door; as a child, she had known Dorothy. She’d always wanted to live in the house, and after medical school, she came back, bought the studio (vacant except for wild animals), and began its restoration.

That Sunday, I returned by invitation. A sign shaped like an artist’s palette hung above the door: Hetzel Studio. “George painted that,” said Dan. We toured from cellar to attic. From Lila’s and Dorothy’s letters and diaries, I’d envisioned a darker, shabbier version of these rooms. They’d never had enough money. Now, the floors gleamed; walls glowed with soft color and period wallpaper.

Over tea and cookies in the parlor, Michelle shared albums of the long restoration process and recounted stories Dorothy had told her. Leaving to repot geraniums, she granted me free range through her archive. Dan positioned a photocopier beside the grand piano and duplicated everything I requested. Onsite-research heaven.

The next visit, a warm afternoon on the porch with hors d’oeuvres prepared by Michelle and pours courtesy of Dan, they suggested a book launch at the Hetzel Studio. Their trust in me, an inquisitive stranger, to write a good novel felt like validation.

Continuing research in libraries, museums, and historical societies throughout the region and in Pittsburgh, I wrote and revised, renaming the book three times: Scalp Level, Still Life, and Coming to Light. Finally, in May 2025, I submitted the finished manuscript, now called Vanishing Point, to my editor.

And I also sent Dan and Michelle an advance copy in late January 2026. Writing fiction, I aim for narrative truth but write it slant, as the poet said. I’d warned them, but would they remember and understand?

Hetzel House. February 11: Michelle & I took a peek at the book. First few pages in the little girl from the farm was nearly in tears.

February 15: Just finished. Tears in my eyes at the end. The characters came to life for me. The emotional connections felt deeply real.

Whew. Tears in my eyes, too.

Once the May 2026 publication date was firm, Dan began planning what became a glorious, ambitious hybrid event: a book launch and milestone birthday party for Michelle.

This past Saturday, Dan directed us to park in the garage, “You have books to bring in for the signing table.” Michelle was in the garage, apron over her party dress, tending fragrant beans in a Nesco roaster (a newer descendant of my mother’s vintage Nesco). As we unloaded books, a van from the Dressler Art Center pulled in beside us. The cargo? Three original Hetzels on loan (and insured to the gills). When Dan initially told me he’d ask about borrowing them, I’d been dubious. “All they can say is no,” he said.

We lugged the sound system onto the porch for my reading. The stage was set for a perfect summer party. Tables draped with white cloths, garden flowers in blue glass bottles, a string duo from the Johnstown Symphony tuning up.

I had a flashing image of Lila’s 1905 wedding on the lawn, the reception supper on the porch. Present and past overlapped and converged.

Guests were arriving. Michelle and Dan’s friends and family, plus my village of archivists, curators, librarians, and friends. Corks popped. The music began. An uninvited fierce wind section joined in, and torrential rain blew onto the porch. Phones buzzed, “Take Shelter!” We scrambled inside.

A falling tree brought down the power lines. But in the studio, lights stayed on — grid-free thanks to the solar panels across the road and batteries in the cellar. At least there was no need to plug in a sound system in the dining room.

The passage I’d selected to read aloud describes the Hetzels arriving at the studio for the first time, on moving day in 1898. I lost my place on the page. The lights were a little dim, but that’s not why I faltered.

It was another slipping, convergent moment. I was in the dining room now with this friendly audience. And I was also in the dining room then with George, his wife, Mary Louise, Lila, and her brothers, Jimmie and Frank.

I caught my breath and read:

“They followed Jimmie into the dining room. ‘Oh, it’s beautiful. And so long. We can keep all the table leaves in,’ said Mary Louise. ‘But where’s the kitchen?’”

Life is indeed stranger than fiction. And occasionally, more wonderful. If you ever want to throw a book party, I know a physician and a magician who do a swell job.

[Photo courtesy of WattersWorks Photography.]

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, Vanishing Point, is out now.

In a recent interview with Publishers Weekly, Badkhen, a former journalist, described the mandate of her current role — a writer rather than a reporter — as “to see beyond the facts” into the realm of things that can’t be verified. In the collection’s first essay, “Our Years of Magical Thinking,” she accompanies a friend to a market in Bamako, Mali, to look for the lion fat that he believes will help his arthritis, a journey that detours into Badkhen’s own herbalist memories from her childhood in Russia. Her friend tells her that “there is a cure for almost anything, you just have to know how to ask.” Badkhen feels, when it comes to both herbal remedies and retaining human decency, that we’ve forgotten how and what to ask.

Her essays call for a widening of the scales at which we think about seemingly contemporary problems. They are global, ancient, and impactful beyond regional or national boundaries, and solving them will require a return to — or a renewed awareness of — traditional practices and forgotten folklore. For Badkhen, who was raised outside of faith, that has even come to include prayer, which can “extend ourselves outside of our dailyness, to restructure our seeing and listening.”

Changing our perspective can also involve reconnecting with the past, as the author does in “Mythologizing Disaster,” when she visits Auschwitz, or in “Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe,” in which she describes the hunger stones of Central Europe. These are “river boulders that people living through droughts petroglyphed with dates and descriptions of their woe,” including scarcity, dryness, and starvation. (Greenpeace left its own modern version of a hunger stone in August 2018.) Badkhen’s virtuosic shifting of scales throughout the book gives readers many routes for connecting with her ideas, many ways of “hold[ing] on to something that astonishes.”

For me, the quotations from hunger stones were especially affecting, but other readers might find resonance in Badkhen’s emphasis on nature’s long-term memory. In “Portholes,” she notes that even after buffalo had been mostly eliminated from the wild in the United States, “the land still holds buffalo memory,” and the animals’ wallows “still maintain, for more than a hundred years, ecosystems that differ from the surrounding landscapes.” Like the hunger stones, these ecosystems have messages for us.

Badkhen is also preoccupied with language on a minute scale, particularly the language we find or create to describe indescribable things. In “How to Discuss the Death of Giants,” she wonders whether we need to rename species that no longer populate their traditional habitats due to climate change. “What are the words to express a world circumscribed by climate catastrophe?” she asks.

And when writing about mass violence, she wonders how, given our limited vocabulary, “we avoid creating shorthand for suffering greater than a heart should fathom.” These are questions unanswerable in a single essay collection, but Badkhen’s asking — and her roving through the multiple languages she speaks in search of approaches to them — opens up the possibility of future answers.

Much of her family was born in St. Petersburg, but many relatives are now “dislocated, déplacé,” she writes in “An Anatomy of Lostness.” She ranges geographically as much as linguistically, and while she writes that she frequently forgets her own economic-migrant status because she doesn’t “fit the stereotype...it has infected me, too, dislocated my sense of reality.” This sense of dislocation seems productive, allowing her to make connections across topics that might box in other writers.

Amid Badkhen’s big-picture questions are small episodes of extraordinary beauty: a moment in a shared taxi from Dakar, Senegal, when she and her fellow passengers regard “a large herd of fat white zebus [that] sways through spiky grass.” Or her description of amber (in a sentence that mirrors the book’s ability to encompass geological time) as “almost sentient, only a wand flick away from being able to speak and tell us all it knows — advents and vanishings of plants and animals, human and nonhuman, and of water, and of land, and even of the soil and rock that make up land.”

The author is herself an amber-like ambassador, one who understands that letting in the vastness of what we face might be the only way to face it.

Sara Polsky is a writer, editor, and educator based in New York City. She is the author of the YA novel This Is How I Find Her.

This podcast comes courtesy of Additions to the Archives with Sullivan Summer. Listen to it here.

Tenn and her family — husband Ward and children Aisling and Anders — have just moved from North Carolina to New York for Ward’s new high-paying, serious job. As a token of love, he buys his wife her dream house. But as they settle in, weird things begin occurring: A random doll appears in the yard, the faucet keeps turning on, and the kids act strangely.

It doesn’t help that Tenn and Ward are having problems in their relationship. She’s left to do all the domestic chores because he’s caught up in his work. They also respond to the mysterious occurrences differently, which only adds to the discord. Ward doesn’t even believe the happenings are paranormal; there has to be a reasonable explanation for everything. Eventually, though, circumstances force them to put their disagreements aside and try to overcome their bizarre new reality together.

I really appreciated how Pokwatka was able to weave the themes of identity diffusion, artistic expression, and domestic bonds into a haunted-house metaphor. Because of the strain created by the otherworldly occurrences, Tenn is compelled to face her own past trauma and other conflicts she unknowingly left behind.

Soon, she starts to get confused about who she is and the choices she’s made, including the one to abandon her beloved career. She tries to get a less-demanding job to help with the money — and to give herself a sense of purpose outside of motherhood — but her husband’s work comes first. The resulting tension between her and Ward is only natural:

“‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, though now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure why she kept apologizing. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was just doing it out of habit, because she didn’t want him to be upset.”

The novel is creepy and unsettling in a good way. I thought it would be a typical ghost story but was happy to be corrected. Here’s one example that demonstrates how the stakes are a bit higher all around:

“[Tenn] was aware of her breathing, keeping it controlled, because fear stirred inside her of what might happen if she got mad. The silhouette in the hall was there for a reason, a reason that was unclear to her.”

Unfortunately, while Pokwatka made some great stylistic choices, her ending felt abrupt and lacked the emotional authenticity of all that came before it. Some important conclusions about the necessity of artistic expression were left undrawn, and other narrative threads — including the one concerning Tenn and Ward’s marriage — were tied up too neatly.

None of this detracts from the fact that Accumulation is a fun, spooky read, but the story would’ve been far more plausible if certain elements had been better fleshed out.

Sarah M. Lawrence is pursuing a degree in English at Penn State.