When Frederick Heigold begins his tale of an unlikely cross-country sojourn, the year is 1906 and his intended audience is Jack London, who’s sitting at the table next to his at a hotel bar. The story isn’t being spoken out loud, however; Heigold has been mute ever since he was shot in the neck at […]
When it comes to getting involved with men, independent Quinn, a gorgeous, green-eyed, 6-foot-tall redhead, has one unshakeable rule: They have to be unhappily married, with no kids. (After all, she’s no homewrecker.) Having sworn off marriage after two failures, only hot sex and romance with no expectations on either side does it for Quinn. […]
In the Bernese German dialect, “grossmeer,” or grandmother, translates literally to “large ocean,” and the sense the narrator has of their own beloved but often troubling Grossmeer reflects this vast, enveloping unknowability. As Grossmeer’s condition declines, the narrator sets out to compile the stories that form the complex throughline from their cloistered childhood in the […]
A diving hawk on the hunt for a mouse loses one of its beautiful feathers. When it lands on the ground, a squirrel snatches it up and uses it in her nest. The wind shakes it free, sending it high above the treetops until it lands in a woman’s hat. And so it goes, flying […]
Young Ria and her faithful dog, Cheetah, are busy preparing to welcome Baba and Dadi, who are flying in from India. Ria greets them with warm hugs, and they ply her with presents and a mithai box bursting with her favorite sweets. As Ria makes an offering of a ladoo to the god Ganesha, her […]
Campbell candidly shares his experiences raising three children alongside his wife, Linda. Their oldest daughter, Alana, was born at an alternative birth center with no complications. Three years later, their second daughter, Kathryn, was also born without any trouble—only to be diagnosed with viral myocarditis (a life-threatening infection that attacks the heart) at just 10 […]
Readers first meet 17-year-old Johannes (Hans) Schmitt on November 9, 1938, as he is walking with his father to the synagogue in Briedheim, Germany. His father is a tailor, and they are bringing clothes to the children in the orphanage attached to the synagogue. Hannah Becker (Hans’ girlfriend) and her father are also at the […]
In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A “wellspring of […]
When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of […]
Ellie Belmont and Kathryn Kepler, together for five years, live a happy and fulfilling life in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. Despite their contentment, an email from Kathryn’s high school boyfriend prompts Ellie to face her fear that Kathryn might leave her for a man. The recently widowed Gary Gibson, a successful Florida real estate […]