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...

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....

Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau edited 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...

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...

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...

Variations on the Body by María Ospina ’99, translated by Heather Cleary (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,...

Poor Richard’s Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father by Nancy Rubin Stuart ’67 MAT (Beacon Press)

In this nuanced look at Benjamin Franklin’s romantic relationships, Stuart writes that Franklin “privately wavered between passion and prudence.” The book centers on Deborah Read, Franklin’s common law wife for 44 years, a sharp businesswoman who...

The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen ’06 (St. Martin’s Press)

Early on in this lively rom-com satire Ursula Bryrne, 35, a single Manhattan brand manager, is lunching with a friend when she wonders, “Is love actually about specificity?” She signs up for
the Arc, a stealthy dating service which for $40,500 will corral all the available data...

The Very Last Interview by David Shields ’78 (New York Review Books)

Always happy to unsettle a familiar form, here Shields, in his 23rd book, takes on the interview. Actually it’s more the idea of the interview as in this brief, entertaining read you’ll find only questions. The book is a winnowed compilation of the 2,700 questions,...