American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
Farmers are few, and their work is extremely intricate, risky, and arduous.
Dog Years
The new Żaba grew to be an ugly dog: disproportional, with long, thin legs and big, elongated paws that contrasted with an average-sized body.
A Boy Named Courage: A Surgeon’s Memoir of Apartheid
Himmet Dajee begins his autobiographical tale in his youth, which is split between Cape Town, South Africa, and India. His life’s timeline is tracked by major events in the world, from his youthful realization of the apartheid system he was born into, to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, to the international community’s establishment of the […]
To Limn / Lying In
At once raw and erudite, this slender book of essays packs a profound wallop. I read it straight through one afternoon during my children’s naptime, out in the backyard where the light filters through oak leaves and dapples our scant, mossy lawn.
Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit
Goldbach’s conservative childhood was mine, and even if it’s not yours, it provides a lesson as to why large parts of the United States vote Republican and suggests how we might approach narrowing a widening chasm of philosophical differences.
The Blessing
Instead, he writes, “my beginning of trauma and violence led me on to a lifetime of creation rather than destruction.” What might our country look like in ten, fifteen, twenty years, if we all were so bold as to envision our present moment in such terms?
The Mills
Photo by Joe Crowley The Mills The mills are on fire in Sanford, Maine. I’m three thousand miles away in Southern California, and I watch the clips on Facebook and local news websites. They’re saying arson, troubled boys who played with fire in the long-abandoned brick buildings. Flames devour disintegrated cardboard and century-old, oil-soaked innards […]
Try to Get Lost
Frank pays affecting tribute to the lives of her mother and sister, both now gone, through the lens of place. And as the essay ends, she recalls visiting this same town years ago with her sister, before this present trip.
50 Miles
It’s lyrical, textured, natural, and unexpected. While the form these essays take are varied in content and style—some are thick and fibrous while others are delicate, unicolored strands that focus on one small aspect of grief—together they make for a rich, textured collection. And yet, from the very first essay, the reader has the foreboding sense that lives and hopes, like St. Germain’s yarns, can unravel at any moment.
A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World
Over the course of ten essays, Rember delivers a withering, if darkly humorous, diagnosis of a society on its last breaths: “We have become a depressingly aged and unfulfilled civilization. . . . Where once we were full of promise and lust for life, we are now sticking to the known and the comfortable. In financial terms, we’re living on interest rather than producing. In agricultural terms, we’re eating the seed corn. In ecological terms, we’re parasitic.”