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 […]
Midway through his handsomely illustrated study of mapmaking, Cheshire quotes diarist Harold Nicolson’s eyewitness account of President Woodrow Wilson kneeling over a map at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, tracing new borders with his finger. The scene captures the book’s central concern: our enduring desire to organize the world through cartography. As the writer […]
“The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.” With that opening sentence, Stonex plunges us into the mind and world of Bridget “Birdie” Keller, a wife and mother in the rural countryside of Wiltshire, England. But Birdie’s world is not quite so tranquil: 18 years earlier, a man was […]
Journalist and author Cohen, author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, strikes gold with a story from Victorian Britain that comes with a scholar’s favorite documentation: court transcripts. In 1883 a wealthy Australian bought a used yacht in Britain and hired a crew to deliver it: an experienced […]
The author opens the book with a series of devastating events that occurred to people in the author’s inner circle that made him realize that “life can be more than mere survival.” Survival mode, he writes, is an “emergency response system” that may manifest as irritability, procrastination, or simply becoming numb. By contrast, thriving is […]
If the unnamed narrator of Tokarczuk’s latest novel appears to bear certain similarities to Tokarczuk herself—an abiding interest in mushrooms and astrology, say—that’s neither here nor there. The novel is set in a remote Polish village close to the Czech border: so close to the border, in fact, that when a visiting German tourist suddenly […]
This first entry in a new series opens with Violet encountering Miller one summer night—he’s taking a walk, and she looks out her bedroom window and spots him in the moonlight. Wealthy Violet, a self-described nerd, becomes a friend and safe haven for aspiring musician Miller, who’s living in a car with his mother. The […]
In this second installment of the author’s fantasy series, teenager Timothy Brennan continues to deal with the recent discovery that he is not a human; rather, he is an elf with some talents of the sídhe, or fairies. In the previous entry, Timothy learned of the existence of elves and his place in their society—he […]