Recent college graduate Elise is in debt—she can’t even afford her antidepressants—although she doesn’t tell her boyfriend, Tom, nor does he know about her longtime eating disorder. Elise is grateful for the opportunity to make good money with Salt of the Earth Sugar, plus she sees harvest work as “a real life experience. Something they […]
A central paradox of the modern era is that we are becoming more unhappy even though, compared with hunter-gatherers, “the comforts, safety, and ease of our existence make us the equivalent of multimillionaires.” So says von Hippel, a longtime professor of psychology, who delved into sociology, anthropology, and biology for some answers. He argues that […]
The author was a child living in the Bahamas when local Bahamians were “rebelling against three hundred years of British domination”; in response, her English mother and stepfather moved the family to Geneva in 1963. There, Moore was enrolled in a finishing school that she found cold, gray, and stodgy. She resolved to make the […]
In 1972, a Purity policeman watches a driver mow down and kill three innocent people on Main Street. Then the madman shoots the officer, and soon they are all dead. Investigators never learn why such an ordinary, apparently law-abiding citizen suddenly committed such a ghastly act, and the sad story gradually fades. Jump a half-century […]
Kwan lives on a quiet mountainside in 1941. Whether his family eats depends on what his father, a woodcarver, and his mother, a painter, can sell at the farmers market. After Kwan overhears his parents worrying over the lack of food in their onggi pot, he ignores their warnings to stay away from Suka’s Farm […]
Ridolfo started working when he was only 12 years old, manning the counter at his parents’ grocery store, the humble beginning to an extraordinarily long, diverse list of jobs. Before he broke into show business as an actor and an indie filmmaker, he had no choice but to support himself with a “lifetime of phantom […]
Now that Susan’s back from Crete and her latest romance, her boss at Causton Books, Michael Flynn, wants her to work with Eliot Crace, a failed mystery author who’s writing a sequel to the late Alan Conway’s tales of detective Atticus Pünd, which she knows far too much about already. As she reads Eliot’s first […]
The author suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Mr. Jay, a next-door neighbor and trusted family friend. The assaults began before the Hettes started kindergarten and continued for years. The psychological fallout from such “capital-T Trauma” was profound—as an adult, the author became a relentless workaholic, precluding genuine intimacy or authentic friendship with others. […]
Amélie comes from a noble family that has fallen on hard times, which is how she came to be in a miserable marriage to simple merchant Hans. While her frugal and pragmatic husband spends most of his time in his library or at his raucous merchant’s guild, Amélie grudgingly tends to the domestic chores expected […]
A family urn is stolen and three armed gangsters set off to retrieve it. They trace the urn back to two thieves who live in a three-story, six-unit apartment building in a small town, but complications quickly arise, and what could have been a simple task quickly spirals out of control. As they drive into […]