For many, Ann Dunham is known as the mother of the 44th U.S. president who happened to be white, and that’s just about all they know about her. In A Singular Woman, Janny Scott retrieves Dunham from the bin of misrepresentation and presents an accomplished woman.
Not all coming-of-age stories are quite as tender as Piper Templeton’s novel Rain Clouds and Waterfalls. The symbiotic relationship among story, character, action, and mood heighten a reader’s desire to finish this book in one sitting.
Piper Templeton is the author of the Beatles' inspired coming-of-age novel Rain Clouds and Waterfalls and the forthcoming mystery Beneath the Shady Tree. It is from typical daily experiences that Piper draws inspiration for both her novels and numerous short stories; perhaps this is why they are so compelling—the drama and ideas of ordinary people who linger in the mind after the first read.
Throughout his thirty years as a CIA agent spying for the People’s Republic of China, Gary Weimin Shang, the protagonist in Ha Jin’s psychological novel A Map of Betrayal, betrays…
There is this about the novel The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The push and pull between reason and emotion, choice and chance, life and death—a trio of diametrical pairings played against each other in the life of the narrator, Antonio Yammara.
James T. Kloppenberg has written an important book that demystifies Barack Obama. In his book, Reading Obama, Kloppenberg reveals a man who is deeply embedded in the American political and cultural tradition of civic virtue.
Introverts need less outside stimulation than extroverts. They shut the door while extroverts keep it open. Introverts work slowly and deliberately, whereas extroverts work quickly and multitask. Introverts’ nervous systems…
Surrounded by nature, the poet immerses himself in its physicality, a primal act that leads him to an understanding, perhaps even an epiphany, that life and death are everywhere, but you can be alive and free in any case.
The poetry of Anthony Perales comprises straightforward and telling narratives about growing up in San Pedro, chasing the dragon, spending time in prison, learning native doctrine in the desert of Southern California, losing love, and finding poetry.
Sometimes a book tears open the fabric of being and forces the reader to question the meaning of existence. A masterpiece of existentialist inquiry, Falling Out of Time by the eminent Israeli author David Grossman is such a book.