44 Poems For You
by Sarah Ruhl ’97 ’01 MFA (Copper Canyon)

Before she became a Tony-nominated playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Sarah Ruhl was a poet. And in this moving, witty debut you’ll find intimate meditations on slowness, marriage, loss and longing, miscarriage, and childhood. They span the time before and after Ruhl...

Not Exactly Retired: A Life-Changing Journey on the Road and in the Peace Corps 
by David Jarmul ’75 (Peace Corps Writers)

Jarmul first served in the Peace Corps in the late 1970s and was stationed in Nepal, where he met his wife, Champa. As he reached his sixties, Jarmul and his wife both felt a...

The Gringa
by Andrew Altschul ’91 (Melville House)

In his ambitious third novel Altschul (Lady Lazarus, Deus Ex Machina) uses the real-life story of Lori Berenson, an American who spent years in a Peruvian prison after falling in with a revolutionary group, as the template for a rich and sprawling narrative. Here Berenson becomes Lenora Gelb, a...

Tell Me, Signora
by Ann Harleman ’88 AM (Elixir Press)

Just after 9/11, and following the slow death of her husband from multiple sclerosis, Kate Hagesfeld flees Providence and heads to a villa outside Genoa for a three-month stay at an academic center. Kate plans simply to revive her long-shelved career as an archaeologist. Instead,...

Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue
by Sarah McFarland Taylor ’90 (NYU Press)

Like a birder strolling through popular culture, Taylor has collected sightings of ecopiety—moments where “greenwashing” is used to offset or ignore a darker reality. A professor of religious studies at Northwestern, Taylor describes situations like the one in Fifty Shades...

Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean
by Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits ’83 (UNC Press)

The Caribbean has been squeezed and molded by colonialism from both sides of the Atlantic for at least the last 300 years, and in some cases for centuries more. This varied, wide-angle history, one that rolls on from first...

The Last Book Party 
by Karen Dukess ’84 (Henry Holt)

It’s 1987, the Bangles are on the boombox, literary agents still send manuscripts out in white boxes, and Eve Rosen, a Brown grad who longs to be a writer but is marking time as an editorial secretary at a New York publishing firm, gets...

Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa
by Akemi Johnson ’04 (The New Press)

Okinawa is home to more than 50,000 Americans and more U.S. military bases than anywhere in Japan. In this fascinating, deeply reported debut, Johnson explores the complex ways in which the...

We Are All Good People Here
by Susan Rebecca White ’99 (Atria)

This multigenerational saga chronicles the twined friendship of two roommates who meet on move-in day at Belmont College in Virginia in 1962. Daniella Gold, whose parents are middle-class liberals from Washington D.C., and Eve Whalen, from an upper crust Atlanta family, form...