Hannah “Cookie” Cooke is a New England–based interior designer whose two specialties are constructing painstaking scale models of crime scenes like the Lizzie Borden house, which doesn’t pay much, and restoring upscale houses, which pays a lot more. Her business, the Ministry of the Interior, gets a commission from neurosurgeon Chuck Halsey and his wife, […]
Bigsby met the playwright in the 1960s, founded the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia in 1989, and has written extensively about his life and work, so his questions throughout the book are knowledgeable, though there’s little new here. The devastating impact of the Great Depression is a constant […]
The narrative focuses on the “brilliant, eccentric, unsettlingly precise” Gödel, a figure whom the author, in an introduction, compares to Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin and describes as not only a mathematician, but also a “philosopher of mystery” who found new puzzles in settled certainties. “In any system that’s powerful enough to talk about arithmetic,” […]
Before Princess Roselyn the Reticent can articulate what she needs, her parents (the king and queen) and the people of her kingdom anticipate it for her. “Was that a speck of dirt? ‘Run a bath for the princess!’” And when they think she wants a treat? Time for “ALL THE ICE CREAM IN THE LAND.” […]
Trip’s baseball roots run deep: His dad’s team won the Little League championship when he was 12, and Grandpa was a minor-league ballplayer. Trip is well aware of the family legacy of baseball, but he feels the heavy expectation to achieve and struggles to carve out a legacy of his own. After his father, who’s […]
Laura is lucky—she’s recently received a Young Artists Grant to write her novel, right on the edge of turning 30. No one she remembers from high school writing classes or graduate humanities classes is making a living by writing. Despite her grant, Laura takes on odd jobs like teaching high school writing workshops. For 85 […]
Historian Goldman’s ambitious book takes a detailed dive into New York City over 10 years. He begins on New Year’s Eve in 1919, describing people partying before Prohibition took hold in this “consummate metropolis” and “home of modernity.” In 1920, the Gotham Book and Art bookstore was born at 128 West 45th Street. That same […]
When Meron’s native Poland was invaded in 1939, he writes in this impressive memoir, “Nazi Germany brought an apocalyptic change in my life: from sweet, uneventful, pampered childhood to the horrors of fleeing from monsters.” Seven years later, having fled those monsters, he arrived in Israel in 1946. “I was nearly 16 years old, with […]
This extraordinary volume of letters offers an intimate portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein, not as the granite logician of legend, but as a man unguarded, needy, joyful, and often undone by love. Written between 1946 and his death in 1951, the correspondence with Ben Richards, a medical student 35 years his junior, documents what Wittgenstein called […]
Young Christian—a stand-in for the author—is such a soccer enthusiast that he carries a mini-ball with him everywhere he goes. But team tryouts turn disastrous when he finds himself surrounded by much taller, stronger kids. His family springs into action—proclaiming the next morning a “Super Soccer Day,” challenging him to earn his breakfast by beating […]