Phoning Home: Essays, Einstein’s Beach House: Stories, and Scouting for the Reaper: Stories

Jacob Appel has been very, very busy. In his early forties, Appel is a lawyer. And a doctor. And a medical ethicist. And, oh yes, according to his author bio, he’s also published more than two hundred stories, collecting numerous writerly awards and accolades along the way. In the last three years alone, he’s released six books: four story collections, a book of essays, a mystery novel, and a literary novel.

A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

The impulse to create and solve puzzles is embedded within us, as is a yearning to go beyond the puzzle—which can be solved—to some deeper mystery—which cannot. The tension between these concepts—puzzle and mystery—forms the center of Turchi’s learned, funny, and uncategorizable book, part writing guide, part literary criticism, and part playful compendium of tricks, games, and problems.

The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest

Thorpe, a longtime BBC correspondent, crafts precise, evocative prose and has a reporter’s gift for what makes a story. He makes the uncommon choice to trek upstream, against the flow of both the Danube and most other accounts of it, letting readers share the sense of drama Thorpe himself clearly feels.

The Lost Years

It happened so quickly I couldn’t remember my other life, the life of the well, that ordinary wake-up-in-the-morning-have-a-cup-of-coffee-and-get-on-with-it self. One day I had a routine: I’d write for an hour each morning at the kitchen table, go to work at nine, come home at six, fix dinner with David, and then read or write until […]

MOTHERs

“I was afraid to write about my female poetry mentors and was deeply afraid to write about my mother,” Rachel Zucker admits in the Acknowledgements of MOTHERs, “So I began.” Taking her own dares is common practice for Zucker, the author of seven books, most recently, The Pedestrians and Home/Birth: a poemic, co-written with Arielle Greenberg.

Mos Teutonicus

photograph by Wayne Stadler General Objective: To provide the students with an opportunity to study the skeletons of numerous animals they find in the ecosystem. Background Information: It is quite common for biologists studying wildlife populations to examine skeletal fragments to determine aspects of a species’ natural history . . . In order to learn […]