Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning by Alan Maimon ’95 (Melville House)

For six years in the early 2000s, until the paper closed the bureau, Maimon was based in Hazard, Kentucky, as the regional correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal. He was tasked with covering an area about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined and the stories...

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan ’00 (Simon & Schuster)

In this vivid, dystopian vision of present-day Philadelphia we meet Frida, an insomnia-plagued mom with an 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, and a fresh academic job. Divorced from her husband, Frida leaves Harriet alone “one very bad day” to scoot into work and grab a file. The neighbors...

Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau by Andrew Blauner ’86 (Princeton University Press)

While you won’t find much of Henry David Thoreau himself in this collection, you will find 27 novelists, poets, critics, and one cartoonist circling his work and teasing out the ways his writing has looped, sometimes surprisingly, through their lives....

Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette ’13 (FSG)

In this debut we meet women who, after their convent is abruptly shuttered, work in a halfway house nicknamed Little Neon (due to its glowing green paint job) where they attempt, and mostly fail, to help the homeless and addicted. Nudging the question of why someone would join a...

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg ’84 (Twelve)

In nine anecdote-laden chapters, Ginsberg, a journalist, media executive, and Clinton administration veteran who writes with a quick, engaging voice, details the below-the-radar influence of a range of first friends: for Bill Clinton it was Vernon Jordan; for Richard Nixon, Bebe...

Variations on the Body by María Ospina ’99 (Coffee House)

Throughout these six intimate, vivid stories about women in Bogotá in the early 2000s you’ll find love, pain, and humor. They include a former guerilla fighter struggling with an editor’s recasting of her memoir as she works the register at a superstore, a woman developing...

Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training by Adam Stern ’06 (HMH)

Adam Stern grew up in a family of doctors, but he arrived at Harvard for a four-year psychiatry residency with a powerful case of imposter syndrome. Stern recounts how he navigated past that anxious start. Thrown into an already whirling clinical world, with patients...

Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch ’95 (FSG)

In this lively, funny-sad read you’ll meet Amanda Evans, a 41- year-old expat whose husband persuaded her to flee her California tech job and parachute into Windhoek, Namibia, with him. You’ll also meet the shiny Persephone Wilder, who also followed her husband, an embassy lawyer, to Africa, and Mila...

Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War by Jeff Shesol ’91 (Norton)

In this page-turning history Shesol recasts the birth of NASA and the Mercury program not as a great leap forward in humanity’s quest to explore the universe but as a crucial front in the Cold War, as there...