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I Needed the World I was Creating

By Filed Under: Books

Our interview with Ann Napolitano on the research and real-life events that inspired her new novel, Hello Beautiful.
Our interview with Ann Napolitano on the research and real-life events that inspired her new novel, Hello Beautiful.

The first chapter of Ann Napolitano’s new novel, Hello Beautiful draws the reader in with a harrowing synopsis of William Waters’ early life in a suburb of Boston. William, a lonely little boy with a basketball, finds comfort in the repetitive sounds of the ball hitting the pavement. His world is narrow; his parents have raised him to be helpless and have deprived him of affection. His mother smokes cigarettes and drinks liquor, while his father, a miserable accountant, works long hours in the city. William’s parents forbid the discussion of his older sister, although they keep a framed picture of her on an end table in the living room. The basketball court serves as a refuge for William. In college, William meets Julia Padavano in a lecture class at Northwestern University. With Julia comes warmth, passion, security, stability, and the saga of living with her three younger sisters and two peculiar parents— under a small roof in a culturally-rich neighborhood in Chicago’s Lower West Side. The four sisters are inseparable. They finish each other’s sentences; they honor one another’s aspirations and eccentricities; and, without hesitation or judgment, they welcome William into their closely-knit kin, despite his uniquely dark past. The Padavano sisters envision themselves as the March sisters from Little Women, foreshadowing the ultimate tragedy that tests their loyalty to one another. 

Hello Beautiful poignantly catalogs the devotion of family and the consequences of loss, power, and mistrust. It is a story that sat inside of Napolitano for years, waiting to be told. In a phone call, Napolitano and I discussed the research and real-life events that inspired Hello Beautiful, and why she feels personally connected to the novel. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 


Hello Beautiful is your fourth published novel, a New York Times bestseller, and Oprah Winfrey’s 100th book club selection. Congratulations! You began writing the novel in April 2020, shortly after the pandemic lockdowns began. Can you tell me more about your experiences in lockdown and the other events that inspired Hello Beautiful?

Yes, I wrote Hello Beautiful in two years. My other novels took between seven and eight years. I began writing during the beginning of the pandemic when everyone in New York City was in lockdown. My dad died that month and because of the pandemic, we were not able to see him while he was dying—and we couldn’t gather after he died. This happened to many families, especially in New York. It was not an uncommon experience but it was very singular to that period. When I started writing, everything happening in the world was so weird. I was isolated and I was grieving my dad. Creating this fictional world had an urgency that, usually when I write, doesn’t exist. This is attributable to what I felt during that time. I needed the world I was creating. I wrote more quickly than I ever have in my life.

The “urgency” you felt to write the novel is interesting. A lot of creatives had breakthroughs in 2020. I have friends who were highly creative and productive in their work, and others—including myself— who shut down. Their creative process was completely hindered by the pandemic lockdowns and economic fallout. 

That was my experience too. The writers I know either wrote obsessively or they found that there was no way they could write at all. One reason isn’t better than the other. I think people did what they needed during that period. I’m glad I was able to write because building a new world was helpful when the real world was in shambles. I found it to be reformative and healing. It was nice to have an escape. 

I can appreciate that— the visceral act of thinking and writing to otherwise escape the unsettling reality we were all living in. Would you say that writing the novel also served as a catharsis? Parts of the narrative arrived from a place of grief. 

Early in the book, the father of the Padavano sisters dies. I didn’t know he was going to die when I was writing. That surprised me but I also was able to go through a wake and a funeral for that father when I couldn’t for my father. Writing the story provided me with experiences that I craved and couldn’t have in real life. I didn’t plan that— it was completely dictated by the story. The story was filling empty holes inside of me in a way that I had never experienced through writing. There was a personal intensity to the emotions in the book, even if what happened at various points in the story were not actually from my life. This feels like my most personal book because my grief and the things I was struggling with pan out in the storyline. 

Other elements in the novel are personal to you for various reasons. In an interview with Oprah on The Oprah Winfrey Show, you said the narrative was “sitting inside” of you. 

Yes. I am woven through this book. Personal stories from my family are what started the book. My uncle, who lived in Chicago, would mail me postcards as a little girl. He always addressed them as, “Hello Beautiful” and that’s what the father in the book— Charlie Padavano— says to his girls. The book is set in Pilsen, the neighborhood in Chicago where my uncle lived. I have a hazy sense of the neighborhood, in this faraway city, that seems magical and fictional. It makes sense that I would build this world in that neighborhood. And Leah, my best friend growing up, had five aunts who went in and out of the house all the time. I was fascinated by them. I used to watch them like they were on television. How they would finish each other’s sentences and how they understood each other completely. They were more whole when they were together than when they were apart. Leah’s mother and her aunts inspired my Padavano sisters. 

Both you and your character, Sylvie Padavano imagined a sad boy dribbling a basketball. You write: “Sylvie tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in home with no affection or laughter and envisioned a cold, echoing space. She saw a little boy dribbling a basketball in order to make a comforting, repetitive sound.” (p. 193)

Can you further discuss the vision of the young, sad basketball player and your vested interest in the sport? 

I always tell my students that they should pay attention to their obsessions because often, the weird things that pull one’s attention will materialize. A few years before I wrote Hello Beautiful, I became obsessed with the history of basketball. I was reading about the history of social justice and was interested to learn that the history of basketball runs parallel. There are amazing figures like Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who had great strides in civil rights. I was fascinated with the history of basketball— so I knew I was going to put that into the book. I can’t articulate why that was so meaningful to me but it was, and it was meaningful to William too, the main character. My obsession with basketball showed up through his lens. 

William Waters, the four Padavano sisters, and many others had significant roles in the story. How did you write the characters? 

For the last two novels, Dear Edward and Hello Beautiful, I did this thing where I would finish the book and then for nine months to a year, I would not let myself write “pretty” sentences— which is what I like to do the most. For example, I like to write a scene and then have a character walk in and say something I didn’t expect. It’s like being a reader because it’s an act of discovery. When I’m doing that, I can’t think analytically. I can’t figure out what makes sense for the story because it’s all intuitive. So, for the first nine months to a year, I don’t let myself write “pretty” sentences. I research, think, take notes, and try to figure out what kind of story I want to tell. I try to figure out who is in the story and what is the most interesting aspect about each interaction and scene. There is a lot that I figure out during this stage, and the characters are part of that. When I actually begin writing, a lot of the notes do not get used. The notes are extensive but will turn out to be wrong. Fortunately, the time I spend mapping out the characters and thinking about them does make them three-dimensional and real. This exercise gives me a starting place that feels solid. I feel like I know them from the first page, and then their stories evolve from there. They surprise me, and again, the intuitive part takes over. 

Researching the historical scope of basketball, coupled with the image of a sad basketball player, became an obsession. Do you find that you are constantly thinking about the characters until the book is in its final stages or published? 

Yes. For example, with basketball, I knew that I was fascinated with the history of the sport. Before I began writing the book, I thought that the character of William might become an NBA physio— which is a person who assists athletes with their bodies. I interviewed an NBA physio in LA while I was there on tour. I try to explore every possible idea that I have and everything that excites me during that period of writing the storyline and developing the characters. This practice is helpful so that when I start writing, I know who they are. They do end up in situations that are unexpected and the deeper work of writing is trying to figure out the right response of the character. 

Do you ever find that you need separation from the characters or do you continue to work through creative challenges? 

My previous books took many years. When I was writing Dear Edward, I would walk into the world of Edward and build the story inside of it, and then leave it at the end of the day. I would continue to think about it— but I would leave it. That was enjoyable. With Hello Beautiful, I was feverish. The story was living inside of me and the only way for me to get any peace was to figure it out. There was tension and urgency. The only way to not make myself sick over it was to write and get the characters’ stories right. I had no break from it. I was always thinking about it. It felt very important. 

In an Instagram post, you wrote that the reason you write is to “make sense of yourself and the world”. I think a lot of artists, regardless of medium, would agree. They are writing or painting or making music about the things they are experiencing. Creating can be enjoyable, albeit compulsive, but it’s also work. The concept of “work” sometimes gets lost. 

I think that’s true because if you’re not an artist, the concept of “art” sounds more meaningful than what a person may think of as “work.” Often, people look with a certain amount of longing at the idea of having work that is so meaningful and rewarding. Art is romanticized, but of course, it is also challenging and difficult. It requires all of me when I’m doing it. It requires all of my experience; all of my curiosity; all of my interests and attention; all of my striving for excellence— everything. There is no way to half-ass it and have it be any good at all. I write because it is the most fulfilling, self-engaging activity I can conceive of doing. 

Ann Napolitano is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Dear Edward. The book was adapted into film series on Apple TV+. In addition, she has authored, A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach. Hello Beautiful is Napolitano’s fourth published novel and Oprah Winfrey’s 100th book club selection. Napolitano lives in Park Slope with her husband and two sons. 

Life in Balance

By Filed Under: Books, Community, Park Slope Lit, Park Slope Reading, Reader Excerpt Tagged With: , ,

Excerpted from Tick Tock: Essays on Becoming a Parent After 40 edited by Vicki Breitbart and Nan Bauer-Maglin (Dottir Press, 2021

My daughter, Eleni, is twenty-one now, but I distinctly remember a day when she was two and I was desperately trying to convince her to put on her shoes so we could go out to play. Eleni was running around distractedly and wouldn’t listen, while my mother, then seventy-five, was repeatedly asking me unrelated questions—something about a neighbor and what we would like for dinner. As I answered my mother’s questions, she asked them again because she was hard of hearing. For what seemed to be an eternity, I found myself caught in a cycle of speaking louder and louder to a two-year-old who wouldn’t listen and to a seventy-five-year-old who couldn’t hear. To a bystander, the scene may have seemed comical, but I was not amused. 

In retrospect, that particular day was golden. The sun was shining, my father—also seventy-five—was out for a run, and my mother was still able to cook the foods of her native Greece. Though I was an exhausted, older single mother, I found immense joy in (eventually) taking my daughter out to play, and, as an only child, I reveled in the fact that my parents had finally been granted a grandchild. My family now felt whole and complete. 

In a few years’ time, things would change. 

“Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a mother; and as I crept toward forty and remained unmarried, this dream, this ambition, didn’t fade. Then when I was forty-one, a confluence of factors arose that made motherhood seem possible.”

Living in an unusually sizable apartment in Brooklyn, I had a steady job that I loved, supportive parents and friends who resided near my home, and a surprising ally in the Chinese government. Though things have changed since, there existed a window of time, a fortuitous opening, when the Chinese government allowed a single woman over forty to adopt a healthy infant—in most cases, a baby girl. (For me this was a bonus, since I intended to raise a child on my own.) On top of that, the adoption process in China was fairly straightforward; and with some luck, it appeared I could be in China within eighteen months, a new mother to a baby daughter. After much thought and reasonable trepidation, I decided to pursue this option. 

On August 16, 1999, I arrived at a dimly lit registrar’s office in central China, where I was handed an eight-month-old baby. At the age of forty-two, I suddenly became a first-time mother. I named my daughter Eleni in honor of my own mother, who had waited patiently for her first and only grandchild. Then nine days later, we flew home to New York, where my parents and friends greeted us at the airport. Eleni and I were set to begin our new life together. 

Our first two years in Brooklyn passed quickly. Eleni was a happy child, a curious child, a child who never slept. By extension, I was always exhausted, holding down a full-time job, caring for my daughter, having few spare moments to myself. But as an older mother, I viewed this juggling act and ever-present fatigue as a small price to pay for the joy of raising a child. As a parent over forty, I’d had countless years of “me time,” during which I could travel, see friends, build a career. So spending a Saturday afternoon with my parents and Eleni was more than enough to make me happy. Having my mother prepare Greek meals and bring them to our house, or seeing my dad play so energetically in the park with my daughter, fulfilled me. I was grateful for my job, grateful to reside in a neighborhood with other adoptive families and little girls from China, and grateful for the multicultural city in which I lived. By some divine stroke of luck, everything seemed in order. 

But as it happens, the best-laid plans often go awry. On September 11, 2001, when Eleni was almost three, the World Trade Center was hit by terrorists, bringing our city to its knees. Several weeks later, the magazine at which I’d worked for nearly a decade folded, citing a consistent loss of revenue. Then, in the spring of 2004, my seventy-nine-year-old father—the bedrock of our family, a man with boundless energy—was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer. How supremely unfair it felt that a man who had valued his health and had so much to live for would be struck with such a fatal illness. Within six months of his diagnosis, my father died, leaving me with countless business affairs to look after, a broken heart, and a mother and daughter who were beyond bereaved. 

Eleni was five, almost six, when her grandpa died, so it was hard for her to comprehend how this vibrant man had left us. On the playground at school, Eleni would look up at the sky and see her grandfather’s wispy, white hair in the cloud formation above her. In class, she described his spirit as coming to her “like a wind,” helping her with her math problems. My dad was athletic, so in tribute to him, Eleni learned to play soccer and tennis. She was fast on her feet and adopted my father’s work ethic. 

My mother, on the other hand, was seventy-nine when her husband died. For years, her health had been faltering, first with coronary bypass surgery in her early fifties, then later with various issues causing memory loss and pain. My mother was surprisingly strong, having survived not only these health problems but also the shelling of Athens during World War II, yet somehow, she liked to convince everyone that she was weak, a victim who needed constant care. 

My father had been that primary caregiver, her rock—her lifeline to the world. When he died, my mother was understandably adrift. In order to protect her, my father had declined to tell my mother exactly how sick he was, perhaps believing he had more time to live than he did. But her lack of emotional preparedness and the relative speed of my father’s passing sent my mother into a tailspin. There were days when she stubbornly refused to take her medication and her memory loss worsened. There were times when she became short-tempered with Eleni and with me. 

As the weeks passed, I tried to keep our lives in Brooklyn in balance. My daughter was in first grade now, learning to read, write, and socialize. I was working from home as a freelance writer and editor, which gave me flexibility in terms of time and workflow. But every weekend, Eleni and I would run out to my mother’s house some fifty miles away to check up on her and a family friend who’d agreed to stay temporarily. My mother was sad, lonely, and increasingly confused, and it became clear she would soon need a higher level of care. The turning point came a short while later, when my mother arrived at my apartment for an extended visit. As she bent to tie her shoelaces one day, she slipped and fell, fracturing a vertebra in her back. It was the last day my mother would walk independently. She would soon need a wheelchair. 

Faced with this new set of circumstances and knowing my mother could no longer live independently, I decided to move her to Brooklyn, into a sunny assisted-care facility near my home. I hired loving professional aides to care for my mother and I visited almost daily. But although the logistics of having my mother close by made life easier, I was still wracked with guilt. I knew my mom was suffering. 

For one thing, my mother wanted to go home, and home meant her house on Long Island. Because of her deepening dementia and overwhelming grief, my mother couldn’t understand why she couldn’t live alone and why my father had left her. In an effort to comfort her and settle her nerves, I brought my mother some personal belongings, including a painting she loved of me and Eleni. I also brought my six-year-old daughter to visit her whenever possible. Sometimes Eleni would draw or play contentedly, and sometimes we would all sit together on the couch, watching TV. But on other days, both my mother and Eleni would vie for my attention while an aide was trying to talk to me. At still other times, Eleni found it too hard to visit. It was tough for her to reconcile the grandma she’d once known with the one now lying in a hospital bed. How could this be possible? 

For more than eight years, I was tasked with balancing the needs of both my mother and daughter. Early on, I decided it would be easier for me to see my mother on my own, preferably when Eleni was at school or at a friend’s house. I could sit and hold my mother’s hand or help feed her. I could take her to doctor visits, check on her medication, and talk to her aides without interruption. Eleni would come for shorter visits, after school or on the weekends. 

My days with Eleni at home and in the world were cherished times and often proved to be the antidote, the needed balance, to caring for an aging parent. As a first-time mother—and an older one, at that—I loved every stage of Eleni’s development. As she grew, my daughter played sports. She read and watched movies. She danced. She had friends. She grew taller than me and at times her grandmother barely recognized her, instead remembering her as a smaller child. While my mother drifted in and out of reality and often in and out of hospitals and hospice care, my daughter found joy in real-life activities. She was thriving, and her curiosity about the world buoyed me. 

Eleni also knew intuitively that I was doing my best in a difficult situation. From the time she was six until she was fourteen, Eleni watched as I cared for my mother as she edged closer to dying and bounced back again. She, along with family friends, helped me clear out our Long Island home with its more-than-fifty-years’ worth of possessions, and she was there on the tearful day we sold it to help pay for my mother’s care. Five years after my father’s mesothelioma diagnosis, I was diagnosed with early-stage endometrial cancer and required surgery. Eleni was there to greet me at home with her godparents on the day I returned from the hospital. I was fortunate in that Eleni had always been a considerate child and a fairly easy one to raise. And as she grew older and into her teen years, she empathetically cut me slack when my conflicting duties got the best of me. 

In hindsight, it’s hard to say how I—we, all three of us— got through those challenging years. Sometimes things fell apart, such as when an aide, Eleni, and I took my mother to a doctor’s appointment and got stranded when our wheelchair-accessible transport failed to arrive. Other times, I lost my patience; occasionally, I completely lost my temper with everyone. Eleni had hard days of her own and sometimes seemed inconsolable despite my best efforts to support her. But even in my worst moments, I was lucky enough to have a village to help raise my child and care for my aging mother. 

During those years, I thought often of my father and how he had run marathons later into life, driven by a will of steel. When he died, it felt as if I’d followed in his footsteps. My marathon, however, was of an emotional nature, a very long race that would call for a great deal of energy, determination, and grit in order to reach the finish line. But because I was an older parent in my late forties and fifties during those “sandwich” years, I was able to draw on decades of my own life experience and find wells of strength I never believed I had. 

I was also willing to refocus my priorities on both my mother and daughter, knowing I had one shot to get this right. (As a result, my career and personal life were indefinitely put on hold.) It soon became clear that I couldn’t help my mother get “better,” but I was dedicated to helping her find some measure of comfort and peace. Over time she became less verbal, making it hard to know exactly what she needed and why she held on for so long. But as one of her nurses once told me, “She has too much love. She’s not going anywhere.” As for Eleni, I had waited so long to become a mother that I wanted our experience together to be memorable. I wanted to soak up all the time we had at each stage of her journey, whether it was the big things, like going to Disney World when she was nine, or the small things, like watching Harry Potter movies on repeat. Her joy, happiness, and sound emotional development were at the top of my to-do list each and every day.

In the end, my mother chose the time and place of her passing. On February 15, 2013, on what would have been my father’s eighty-eighth birthday and one week short of her own, my mother died in the Brooklyn hospital where I was born more than fifty years earlier. In another act of perfect symmetry, she was holding the hand of my daughter, a child who was then fourteen and had been named after her, years earlier. 

It was an emotional walk home from the hospital that night. But when we arrived back at our apartment, I pulled out my mother’s wedding ring, a simple, silver band with tiny, twinkling diamonds – a symbol of my parents’ long commitment. I slipped the ring onto my hand thinking I might wear it, but it just didn’t look right on me, so I offered it to Eleni. By some stroke of magic, it fit perfectly on her long, slender ring finger, and I joked that my mother’s ring chose its wearer, just like Harry Potter’s wand chose him. 

Eleni has worn my mother’s ring religiously since that night. It traveled with her and protected her on the subways she took to high school. It swam with her and glistened in the turquoise-dappled waters of the Aegean Sea. It accompanied her to college and to a semester abroad in Italy. It has been given a new life, a new set of adventures in a modern world. My mother’s ring was one that I loved and admired during childhood, and it’s a ring my daughter wears proudly now in memory of her namesake. It’s a symbol of the time that my mother, Eleni, and I all spent together—and a symbol that we all made it through. 

Tick Tock reading at Community Bookstore on Wednesday, 10/6 at 7:30PM EDT featuring Laura Broadwell, Cathy Arnst, Jean Leung, Salma Abdelnour, and editors Vicki Breitbart and Nan Bauer-Maglin.

STEADFAST: Frances Perkins, Champion of Workers’ Rights

By Filed Under: Books, Local Literature Tagged With: , ,

Frances Perkins gasped in disbelief when she visited a factory and saw the horrific conditions that workers endured. Moved by injustice, she felt compelled to help, setting her on a path of social work. 

But, when Frances witnessed New York City’s Triangle Factory fire in 1911, her desire to assist the American worker transformed into a lifelong mission. Determined to fix the problems that led to the tragedy, Frances worked to change a broken system at a time when women were discouraged from speaking up, let alone having careers. She saw the potential for radical workplace reform, if she could persuade her male colleagues to listen to her. Rather than shrink from challenges, she followed her beloved grandmother’s advice to embrace life’s opportunities and walk through open doors. In truth, Frances kicked them open along the way. 

With courage and integrity, she became the first woman to serve in a U.S. Presidential Cabinet, creating an enduring legacy. As Secretary of Labor, she was the force behind the New Deal and Social Security, programs that protect American workers to this day. This is the inspiring story of a heroic trailblazer. She’s the most important woman you likely haven’t heard of – yet.

www.jennifermerz.com

Spring Reading

By Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to head to the park for an afternoon—or several of them—of outdoor reading. Below, our recommendations for the best new books to read under a Prospect Park tree:

 

1. The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Urrea (The Devil’s Highway) comes a multigenerational saga of loss, love and the borderlands between cultures. The family of Miguel de La Cruz, or “Big Angel,” has gathered to celebrate the dying patriarch’s final birthday, when, unexpectedly, Big Angel’s elderly mother passes away. As the weekend unfolds and the Mexican-American clan recounts its family legends, Big Angel’s half-brother, “Little Angel,” wrestles with his half-Mexican, half-gringo identity. Urrea, whose brother was dying of cancer when his own mother passed, has said the sprawling narrative is based on true experiences.

 

2. The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

This sophomore novel of literary giantess Lispector is available in English now for the first time. Initially published in Portuguese in 1946, The Chandelier is a stream-of-consciousness account of the life, loves and densely worded thoughts of our protagonist, Virginia. We follow Virginia through her childhood with her brother and best friend, Daniel; across the years with a group of aesthetes; and as her heart breaks when Daniel becomes engaged. Lispector would go on to write such classics as The Passion According to G.H., and to be remembered by American author Benjamin Moser as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.

 

3. The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

When ambitious Greer Kadetsky lands her dream job at the foundation of her feminist icon, Faith Frank, her future could not seem brighter. But as time passes and Kadetsky is forced to contend with twists and tragedies, her understanding of Frank the woman, as well as what it means to be a woman at all, changes. Wolitzer’s first book for adults since her 2013 hit The Interestings tackles the female zeitgeist with, according to TIME, “a gimlet eye.” 

 

4. Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

A coming-of-age novel set in Britain just after WWII, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, who, as children, were left by their mother to the care of a mysterious man named “the Moth.” They soon learn their mother lied to them when she gave her reason for leaving. Years later, Nathaniel pieces together all that he failed to understand as a child, taking us along for the unconventionally written ride through recollections, facts and speculation. Ondaatgje previously won the Booker Prize for the romance, The English Patient. 

 

5. Islandborn

by Junot Diaz

The acclaimed author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes his first foray into children’s literature with the picture book, Islandborn. Everyone in Lola’s class is from somewhere else. When their teacher asks that they draw “the country you were originally from,” Lola becomes anxious. She knows she’s from “The Island,” but she doesn’t remember the place. Soon she’s embarking on a quest to understand her heritage, interviewing family, friends and neighbors, who describe a beautiful, vibrant land, which was yet rife with fear and turmoil. Questions of belonging and collective memory give this slim book, illustrated by Leo Espinosa, novelistic heft.

 

6. Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

McBride may be only 27, but the eventful life she has led to date more than justifies this publication of her memoirs. For those who can’t place the name, McBride is the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign as well as the first transgender person to speak at a national convention. Tomorrow Will Be Different chronicles her struggle to come out while acting as American University student-body president, her political fights for equal rights, and her relationship with the transgender man who would become her husband before tragically dying of cancer. Alternately political and personal, Tomorrow Will Be Different is a stirring account of one remarkable woman’s life and loves.

 

7. The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

The author of The Empathy Exams returns with this nonfiction examination of her journey toward sobriety. Interwoven among autobiographical accounts are reflections on famous alcoholic writers, including John Berryman and Raymond Carver, as well as works of reportage and literary criticism. The book’s erudition and, yes, empathy, have earned the writer, who has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, high praise.

 

8. Not That Bad

Edited by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist’s Roxane Gay edits this anthology of essays—some previously published, others issued here for the first time—on rape and sexual assault. Writer-contributors include actors Gabrielle Union and Ally Sheedy and authors like Amy Jo Burns and Bob Shacochis. Not That Bad is an unflinching examination of a world in which women who speak out are, in the words of Gay, “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied.”

 

9. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

by Zora Neale Hurston

A remarkable literary achievement, Barracoon is Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction account of American slavery, based on her interviews with one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of elderly Cudjo Lewis, whom she met in 1927, and who was abducted from Africa before being taken to the United States 50 years after the U.S. officially abolished the slave trade. From his childhood in Africa, to the horrors of abduction and The Middle Passage, to life in America and the founding of an African-centric community in Alabama, Cudjo’s story is told in Hurston’s inimitably compassionate style.

 

10.  The Opposite of Hate

by Sally Kohn

With this book, CNN commentator—and Park Slope resident!—Sally Kohn has set herself a difficult task: “to discover why we hate and how [we] can stop it.” She speaks with researchers and scientists in an effort to learn about the cultural and evolutionary roots of hate, travels around the world, from Rwanda to the Middle East and around the United States, profiling people commonly associated with notions of hatred: white supremacists, terrorists and Twitter trolls, to name a few. And she probes several shameful moments from her own past, when she failed to do what, with this book, she hopes to help others do: wander out from “this wilderness of hate.”

Park Slope Reading: Our Winter Reading List

By Filed Under: Books, Local Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The weather outside is frightful–and we couldn’t be happier for the excuse to stay inside and read. Here are our picks for the Top 10 Books with which to hibernate this winter. 

 

Eat the Apple

by Matt Young 

This formally inventive memoir by ex-Marine Young comes specially recommended by Community Bookstore’s Ezra Goldstein. Young had only recently graduated from high school when he joined the Marines back in 2005, a decision that would, as Publishers Weekly describes it, change him into a “dangerous and damaged man.” Sections written in the third person, in the second person, as screenplay, and as imagined dialogues, as well as with a host of other techniques, give this account from an ex-grunt-turned-creative-writing-professor a singular power.

 

What Are We Doing Here?

By Marilynne Robinson

A favorite of Community Bookstore’s Stephanie Valdez, Marilynne Robinson returns this winter with a collection of essays on the little things in life, such as culture, history, and human decency. Among other topics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author writes eloquently on our political climate and the “human capacity for grandeur.” For those who like their ideas as deep as they are expansive.

 

Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

‘Tis the season for lady authors with formidable intelligences. This second collection of essays from celeb (one who is celebrated as well as a celebrity) author Smith includes her thoughts on cultural touchstones from Facebook to global warming. It is divided into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—and is certain not to disappoint her numerous fans.

 

Sunburn

by Laura Lipmann

This highly anticipated novel is no. 23 from the bestselling Lippman. A former reporter and author of the popular series about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan, Lippman has written Sunburn as a noir in the vein of James M. Cain (of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity fame). A young mother up and leaves her husband and daughter while on a beach vacation. Who she is and just how many skeletons she is hiding in that closet of hers filled with items to complement her sexy red hair are just two of the questions that drive the twisty plot.

 

Madness is Better Than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

A Hollywood crew intending to shoot a film on the location and members of a New York corporation who want to ship it back to the U.S. simultaneously descend upon a Mayan ruin in 1930’s Honduras. Twenty years later, they’re all still there. This raucously comic novel from the Man Booker-nominated Beauman (for 2012’s The Teleportation Accident) is filled with the author’s trademark wit and features a host of colorful characters, incident, and a wrestling match with an octopus.

 

The Man of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

This is the sort of true tale for which the phrase “stranger than fiction” was invented. Eggers’ nonfiction story centers on Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an American raised by Yemeni immigrants in San Francisco. At 24 and unable to afford college, Alkhanshali was working as a doorman when he learned that coffee originated in his native Yemen. He traveled to the country determined to revitalize its coffee industry—and was still there when civil war broke out, leaving him unable to return home. A real-life hero’s journey.

 

The Children of Blood and Bone

by Tomi Adeyemi

This 600-page fantasy novel earned Adeyemi a hefty payday that included seven figures and a movie deal. Not too bad for a 23-year-old debut author. In this first installment of a planned trilogy we meet 17-year-old Zélie. She embarks upon a quest to retrieve the magic that has been banished from her homeland by an evil king. The Nigerian-American Adeyemi draws heavily upon the West African mythology she studied in Brazil after graduating from Harvard, and speaks to timely issues of race, power and oppression.

 

Jagannath

by Karin Tidbeck

WIRED calls this first collection of English-language short stories from the Swedish Tidbeck “weird in all the right ways.” Her influences range from Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guin to H.P. Lovecraft. Strange creatures lurking in the Swedish countryside, strange reproductive facilities operating inside the belly of an aircraft, strange happenings between sisters and the fairylike beings they encounter…For those who like their literature to transport them far off the beaten path.

 

Extraordinary People

by Michael Hearst

This latest from Park Slope local Hearst includes mini profiles of 50 fascinating and fairly off-kilter individuals. Curious about the man who agreed to jump Niagara Falls for a whopping $75? How about the woman who walked to the North Pole solo, or the guy who MacGyvered his own personal version of Up using helium balloons and a lawn chair? For the full effect, purchase the book-and-CD (called Songs for Extraordinary People) combo.

 

Unraveling Rose

by Brian Wray

In this children’s book by Wray of Windsor Terrace, a stuffed bunny named Rose loses interest in all the things she once loved when a tiny loose thread dangling from her arm becomes all that she can think about. The author hopes his book can help parents and teachers discuss with children the effects of obsessive thoughts, as well as be a helpful tool for kids who suffer from anxiety disorders. A charming and timely offering.

 

The Art of Bookselling • The Reader Interview

By Filed Under: Books, The Reader Interview Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein of Community Bookstore

 

“You’re really catching us on quite a day,” said Stephanie Valdez when I met up with her and Community Bookstore co-owner Ezra Goldstein one afternoon early in December. Not only was the usual holiday rush upon them, there were last-minute children’s book fairs to coordinate (“it’s almost like setting up two more stores”), book orders to be completed without delay, and sniffles to be suppressed as best one could. (All sneezes have been omitted from the following conversation.) Yet the staff was in good cheer. When I arrived, Ezra was standing by the front register regaling several employees and a customer with a story. Stephanie laughed as she typed busily at the computer, while store mascot Tiny the Cat lounged with characteristic disinterest inside his basket in a corner of the window.

At the back of the store by several bowls of cat food Stephanie and I chatted before Ezra, busy with orders, joined us partway through the conversation. They spoke of current bestsellers, the books that should be selling better, that episode of “Louie,” the charm of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a man, his chicken and Tiny the Cat.

To begin, it would be great if you could describe how you found the store when you first took over in 2011.

Stephanie Valdez: How we found it? In what condition?

Exactly, how you would describe the space.

SV: The store was much different then than it is today. Ok, how would I describe it. The owner, who’s a friend of ours, her name is Catherine, she’d moved to Albania, and she was going back and forth between here and Albania on a regular basis, and the store was being run by a couple of college students who were here trying to do their best under the very difficult circumstances. The store was in debt; it was filled with animals. We had two dogs, two cats, a bearded dragon, a bunny, and two turtles. Which made it chaotic. And physically, the store was sort of a labyrinth of shelves and nooks and crannies, and it was in need of some work. We actually bought it in 2011, but we took over in 2010, so we spent some time just fixing it up. And it was really wonderful, in a way, because the work that needed to be done was so clear. Every day you’d come in and you’d just tackle a corner. It was sort of like a fixer-upper project where you’re renovating a house, where every day you can tackle a project and turn it around and make it better. And that process was sort of a gift to us and part of why we decided to buy the store.

What would you say is the most interesting event that you have hosted?

[pullquote]We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity[/pullquote]SV: That’s a really tough question. I’d have to think about that a little bit. Certainly our most packed ever was when we had Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s when he suddenly got very famous, and we knew it would be packed, but it ended up being like, wall-to-wall standing-room-only for 200ish people. We’ve never hosted anything like that, before or since.

Was it in this space, in the bookstore?

SV: [Nods affirmatively] There was a line outside the door. To get him into the space we had to move people aside in order to go through. There’s actually a picture on The New York Times site of him parting the crowds to walk through this completely packed space. That was also very charming, because he ended up staying and hanging out with us for the whole evening in the garden, drinking cheap beer, which is unlike what most authors do.

What do most authors do?

SV: Especially touring authors, when they come to New York they have dinner with their agent or they go out with their friends that are local. It’s rare that they sit in the Community Bookstore garden and drink cheap beer.

Is there a writer whom you have never hosted that you would love to?

SV: I always wanted to host Marilynne Robinson. And then we actually did host Marilynne Robinson and I was judging a literary prize. And of all days, it’s the day we were hosting Marilynne Robinson that I had to be in another city, judging a prize. And I tried to make it work and there was just no way to be in two places at once, and so, I missed hosting Marilynne Robinson. Which was unfortunate. But I have hope that we will host her again.

 

 

Do you have a favorite Park Slope author?

That seems fraught.

It does!

SV: It seems like if I do, I shouldn’t say. [Pause] Probably Siri Hustvedt.

And why is that?

SV: I just love her books. They’re brainy and complex and feminist and brilliant.

Are you yourself a writer?

SV: I dabble a little bit, but I’ll say no, not currently.

I know you also manage Terrace Books. What are some of the challenges you face as you try to manage these two spaces at once?

SV: Time. Time is the biggest. Terrace Books is sort of my side-hustle. My husband runs that shop. But I do most of the book-buying. And I also do a bit of rare books out of that space, and so, that’s my side project. Bookstores require a lot of time. I mean, it’s a small space, you think, how complicated is it to run a bookstore? Somehow there are always new books and there are always new events. So, however much time we have, it doesn’t ever seem to be quite enough.

How would you describe a typical day at Community Bookstore?

SV: A typical day involves coming in, feeding the cat, turning on all the lights and the computers, and then, Ezra orders books every day, every weekday, so he works on book orders. And then the thing about working in a bookstore is that you never know what the day will bring. You never know who will show up and what questions they’ll ask and what conversations will ensue. There’s a lot of email in my job, between events and ordering books and all sorts of things. And tending the shelves, shelving books. I do less unpacking than I used to, but we get boxes and boxes of books, five days a week. So, this time of year, it can be 40 boxes of books.

Do you read all the new books that come in?

SV: Oh, I wish. We try to read as much as we can, but that just depends.

Do you try to set aside time to do so?

SV: Reading is not part of our day-job. It’s all extra-curricular. So, just like anywhere else, we have to fit it into our after hours’ time. I have a one-year-old, so, currently my after hours’ time is a little more limited than usual.

Are you reading any books to your one-year-old?

SV: Oh, yes. He’s a very avid reader so far. He’s now at the phase where he tends to want to repeat the same books.

Which can be both fun and a little maddening, I would imagine.

SV: Yeah, I’ve already memorized a shocking number of children’s’ books, which makes me realize I could have been memorizing all kinds of things all along.

Does he have a favorite?

SV: What’s his absolute favorite right now? He really likes The Quiet Noisy Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. She’s famous for Goodnight Moon. This is sort of a lost book of hers that’s been republished. And a book called Hooray for Birds [by Lucy Cousins]. Which is just about birds.

I know you mentioned [Tiny] the cat earlier as well. I’ve read a few different stories about him. Do you have a favorite?

SV: Well, my favorite was when I was hosting a story-time for an author and there was a group of toddlers sitting here on the floor and a man walked into the middle of the event and pulled out a chicken from under his coat, and put the chicken down on the ground. And within an instant, Tiny was chasing the chicken and we were chasing the chicken and Tiny to try and prevent disaster in front of this group of toddlers.

Why did this man bring a chicken to the store?

SV: I guess there was a chicken in the book and they thought it might be fun if he just showed up and brought a chicken. It was a show-and-tell type thing. But we weren’t warned about the chicken, and cats and chickens don’t really mix. And I guess he had a cat at home as well as a chicken, so, as far as he knew, cats and chickens cohabitated just fine. But our cat, Tiny, does kill birds with some regularity, so, this was not your average cat.

These were not characters from a children’s story.

SV: Exactly.

[Ezra joins]

What is your current bestseller here in the store?

SV: Is it Jennifer Egan?

Ezra Goldstein: It would be close between Manhattan Beach [by Jennifer Egan] and Sing, Unburied, Sing [by Jesmyn Ward], I think.

Are there books that you believe ought to be selling better than they are? 

EG: Well, there are a lot of books like that. But there are a couple of books that I’ve read recently that are really outstanding that didn’t make any of the best lists that should have been on the lists. One of which I’m reading now called Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, terrific book. Another is Solar Bones [by Mike McCormack], really good book. But that’s up to us, because a lot of books that we think are really good don’t get the publicity that they deserve, because they come from small presses or they go under the radar. In general, small presses don’t get the publicity they deserve, so that’s why we exist, to put those books in people’s hands.

How do you try to find the smaller under-the-radar books?

SV: We talk a lot to those small publishers as well as talk to other readers, whether it’s other booksellers, customers who come in. We read reviews. You try to keep your ear to the ground for good things coming out.

EG: The book Reservoir 13, one of our customers told me I had to read it. And she was right.

Do you have customers coming in and asking you for books that are not currently stocked?

SV: Every day. We do a lot of books by special order, because we’re such a small store, and we can often get books within a day or two. So, yes. We often have people special-order books. And then we often take a look at them to see if that’s something we should carry.

EG: I think it’s also that it’s connected to our reputation, that we can get books and we’re really good at getting books. And also our clientele tend to be people who go very deep into backlist books, you know, books that came out 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Those are the kinds of readers that we have.

SV: Our customer base is filled with just great readers and they often recommend us books, so it is a two-way conversation.

Have you ever had a particularly unusual request?

SV: For a book?

Yes, for a book, something that was very difficult to find, that was very old, or very rare. Speaking of Terrace Books as well.

SV: Well, we don’t do rare or used special orders. So mostly, it’s just things that are out of print. I think the most frustrating thing is when there’s something that’s out of print that shouldn’t be. There have been various points in time when certain books are just out of print, and it seems like it shouldn’t be out of print.

EG: With some regularity we’ll track down a book in England that we order for people. It’ll take a month to get, but, you know, we’ll get it.

SV: We don’t really have a zany story. It’s mostly pretty prosaic.

EG: One of the great stories was that Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the original one that came from the South Dakota historical society. It got written up somewhere and became this surprise bestseller.

SV: In The Times, yeah.

EG: This poor tiny historical society in South Dakota was cranking out books. So I was calling South Dakota and we actually got—I think we got just about every copy they had. [Laughs]

What is the book that you’ve been recommending the most recently?

EG: Well, you know, it depends on who the person is. But, the Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won all the prizes, deserved them. It’s a very fine book. But it’s not for everybody because it’s a very grim and hard book. That’s the art of bookselling, is trying to match the recommendation with what people want.

I also saw that Community Bookstore was featured in an episode of “Louie” a few years ago. Have you had customers coming in and asking you about that?

SV: I actually haven’t had any inquiries lately.

EG: Not lately.

SV: Since the scandal.

EG: But a lot right after the show came out. A lot. People would come in and wander around and say, ‘Nah, this isn’t the store. It’s not big enough.’ [Laughs]

SV: It’s unfortunate. We weren’t necessarily fans of his, and a couple of years ago quite a few rumors were flying around about these allegations. So we haven’t really used that footage as publicity or anything and we met him in passing once. I don’t think we have anything especially interesting to say about him or the scandal.

EG: Although I did get to hang out with Parker Posey, so.

Is she cool in real life?

EG: Oh, yeah. She’s really neat. Yeah. She’s really nice. She was in the episode.

SV: And Chloe Sevigny as well.

EG: Yeah, Chloe Sevigny, that’s right. Both very nice.

SV: Both readers.

Did they buy anything?

EG: Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. And the producer, who’s a wonderful woman, bought a whole big stack of books.

SV: We’ll probably continue to just keep our distance and move on.

You read a lot about the resurgence of independent bookstores nowadays, in spite of Amazon. To what would you attribute your continuing success here?

EG: A very loyal customer-base. And just being fortunate to live in a neighborhood where people like to shop small and like to see what they’re buying and like books, love books.

SV: Dedicated readers. We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity.

 

 

Park Slope Reader Fall Reading Recommendations

By Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , ,

“With the arrival of chillier weather comes a new batch of books with which to curl up. Here, a list of 11  titles to enjoy this fall.”

 

Sing, Unburied, Sing

— by Jesmyn Ward —

In her first novel since 2011’s National Book Award-winning Salvage The Bones, Ward tracks a mixed-race family through rural Mississippi. Jojo is a lonely 13-year-old who helps his grandparents raise his baby sister, while his mother, Leonie, struggles with drug addiction, visions of her dead brother and an obsessive love for Jojo’s white father, recently released from prison. Combining allusions to The Odyssey and The Old Testament with elements of magical realism, Ward has written a book, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, whose “Southern gothic aura recalls the dense, head-spinning prose of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor.”

 

The Origin of Others

— by Toni Morrison —

Nobel and Pulitzer-winning Morrison draws on her 2016 Charles Norton Lecture series at Harvard for six essays that try to answer the question, “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?” As she engages with historical events and literary texts, from those of Hemingway to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Faulkner to Flannery O’Connor (and several of her own novels), the author examines the process of “othering” and racial dehumanization. Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

A Legacy of Spies

— by John Le Carré —

Fans of the indubitable master of the spy thriller, David Cornwell, aka, John Le Carré, rejoice: the author has returned with his first George Smiley novel in over 25 years. The focus here is on Smiley’s aged colleague and disciple, Peter Guillam, who has been living on a remote farm in Brittany when a letter from the British Secret Service arrives to summon him to London. It seems his Cold War past has returned to haunt him…The novel deftly weaves past with present, so one may want to revisit its predecessors, including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, first.

 

Tales of Two Americas

— edited by John Freeman —

If the bombast and vitriol of today’s news cycle has gotten you down, or if you’re someone who understands large questions best when they’re distilled to human scale, you may enjoy this collection of essays, longform journalism, short stories, and poetry that addresses contemporary American inequality. Heavy-hitters including Roxane Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Patchett, and Karen Russell, among others, contribute their insights as they “look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation.”

 

Manhattan Beach

— by Jennifer Egan —

This novel recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, from the author whose A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and

National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is a noir-like tale set during WWII. Our heroine is Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who has taken advantage of the employment opportunities that a country at war has newly afforded women, and become the first female diver. One night she runs into an old friend of her father’s, a man who may help her understand the reasons for her father’s disappearance. Publisher’s Weekly raves, “the novel is tremendously assured and rich, moving from depictions of violence to deep tenderness.”

 

The World Goes On

— by Lázló Krasznahorkai —

The Hungarian Krasznahorkai is a favorite of none other than Krauss herself, who calls him “one of the finest writers at work today.” In this collection of what could best be described as short stories, although their form, like many Krasznahorkai tales, defies categorization, a narrator addresses the audience directly before telling 11 stories. Krasznahorkai explains, “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or narrative.” A must for those who like their fiction with an overtly philosophical bent.

 

The River of Consciousness

— by Oliver Sacks —

This posthumous collection of essays from the late scientist, bestselling author and polymath explores several of the grand themes with which Sacks engaged throughout his life’s works: memory, time, consciousness, and creativity among them. It is one of two books on which he was working at the time of his death, and includes reflections on misheard words and the importance of Darwin’s botany.

 

Mrs. Caliban

— by Rachel Ingalls —

This reissue of the 1982 novel centers on suburban housewife Dorothy, who, while doing chores and waiting for her husband to return from work, hears a radio announcement warning of a monster that has escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research. Naturally, a romance between the lonely woman and the lizard-like creature ensues. Reviewers have compared the book to “King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’ domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter.” How could you resist?

 

Five-Carat Soul

— by James McBride —

From the author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird comes a collection of short stories that treats our “struggle to understand who we are in a world we don’t fully comprehend” with humor and inventiveness. The stories themselves follow, among others, an antiques dealer tracking a toy once commissioned by the Civil War commander, Robert E. Lee; Abraham Lincoln himself; and the members of the titular Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band, each of whom recounts a tale from his entertainingly messy life.

 

 Keeping On Keeping On

— by Alan Bennett —

The man who wrote The History Boys, The Madness of King George and The Lady in the Van returns with his third collection of prose. Included are expanded versions of the diaries he publishes annually in the London Review of Books, and which address fame, public libraries and “tweeness.” He takes witty aim at his public persona: “I am in the pigeonhole marked ‘no threat’ and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a Teddy Bear.”

 

Forest Dark 

— by Nicole Krauss —

Krauss’ fourth novel follows two Americans – the wealthy retiree, Jules Epstein, and the Brooklyn novelist, Nicole – as they travel to Israel in search of new meaning. What the LA Review of Books calls Krauss’ “most inward-looking novel” and The Guardian “a brilliant achievement” is a meditation on self-transformation and that which lies beyond the visible world.

The One Life We’re Given

By Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

No matter where we think we’re going, the journey of every life is to find its home in the moment where everything touches everything else.

When we can feel what is ours to feel, and inhabit our own particular moment—of love or suffering, of beauty or pain, of peace or agitation—that depth of feeling allows us to live once for all time. To live once for all time means that the depth of our one life, once opened, is filled with the stream of life from every direction. To live once for all time means that try as we do to add to the one life we’re given in our attempt to run from death, the incarnation of being human forces us to open the one life we’re given, so we might be immersed in the well of all life for the brief time we’re here. One life lived wholeheartedly and without disguise is more than enough. Nothing could be more precious or out of our control. Though we can try.

As a jazz musician spends years learning the intricacies of his instrument, never knowing when the goddess of music will sweep his practiced hands along, we master many paths, never knowing when we will be swept into the presence of beauty. As a shortstop fields thousands of grounders until his hands are blistered, all to be ready for the unpredictable bounce that will happen under the lights, we meditate, study, and field thousands of questions until our mind is blistered, all to be ready for the unpredictable bounce of circumstance that will bring us closer to life. In just this way, the heart learns the scales of love, never knowing when the work will be turned into song.

This journey to inhabit the one life we’re given is archetypal. Everyone who’s ever lived has had to go through it, though no two souls ever go through it exactly the same way. Yet we all experience common passages. As we start out, we’re preoccupied with finding our way, with discovering who we are, with defining ourselves by contrast with everything around us. We try to set ourselves apart by creating something out of nothing, by out-reaching or out-racing others. But sooner or later, obstacles throw us off course and the first versions of our life plans, always dear and precious, are broken. Then we’re sent into a passage of not-knowing, unsure where to go and what to do. Less certain, we’re challenged to inquire into a larger view of life that includes us but is not defined by us.

At this point, we’re ready to discover who we are a second time. With nowhere to go but here, with nothing to do but open the one life we’re given, a journey begins in which we experience life rather than dreaming that we can escape it. We start to invest who we are and all our care into where we are and slowly become one with everything we encounter. By now, there’s been enough suffering that we can feel our kinship with others and the depth of our care is closer to the surface.

In time, the heart works its way into the presence of grace by showing up completely, no matter the circumstance. We learn that meeting life with an open heart is how we can feel where everything is joined. Our call then is to let the soul out and the world in. Where soul and world touch, we spark alive. When our soul expresses itself in the world, our aliveness shows, and we begin to do our part in sustaining a Universe that keeps unfolding.

When the soul expresses itself, we experience enlivened arcs of grace in which we feel the force of life that runs through everything. Anything that moves us to carry our soul out into the world is a catalyst of grace. In this way, love, friendship, creativity, pain, and loss are agents of grace, as are surprise, beauty, grief, and wonder. And while experience wears us down to what’s essential so the soul can stop being encased, it also takes daily effort to let our soul out and an open heart to let the world in, so we can spark ourselves alive and finally be of use. Like it or not, we’re opened by the hard, sweet journey of being human, until we’re sparked and worn into a gateway for life-force.

_________________________________________________________

One life lived wholeheartedly and without disguise is more than enough.

_________________________________________________________

Seeds to Water

  • In your journal, describe a time when you defined yourself by contrast with everything around you. How did you set yourself apart? At the time, how did defining yourself this way help you? How did setting yourself apart from others hurt you?
  • In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you were asked to discover who you are a second time. What have you learned about your own nature? How is this second self different from the first version of yourself? Do you feel that you’re arriving at a foundational sense of who you are? If so, what does the foundation of you look like?

Excerpted from The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom that Waits in your Heart

By Mark Nepo and published by Atria Books

MarkNepo.com

Summer Reading

By Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Summer reading is better than ever. 

It’s true that most of us would rather spend our time during the summer eating BBQ, visiting Aruba, or finding any excuse to avoid our professional obligations. But summer reading at its finest isn’t work. It’s a clear, pure moment we find for ourselves as the weather gets hotter, muggier, messier. Some of us can’t afford anything other than a staycation, anyway!  

Without a good summer book to fall into, we are minimizing introspective pleasures that are as good as an intoxicating (or intoxicated) night by the blissful waterfront. A subway ride is almost intolerable without a good book, no matter the season, but especially summer as the tourists flood the city and every good urban citizen needs to bury their eyes in an alternate reality. Even more convenient when the alternate realities are as seductive as the ones I have listed below. The list doesn’t end — it merely begins here. Think of a good summer read as a new pair of shades, a really good pair, blocking out the sun in style. Substitute sun with urban idiocy and style with … style.

Leaving LucyLeaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon 

Fiction

Sink into Park Slope author Anna Solomon’s novel, about the entangled lives of two women in 1920s New England, who share their status as mothers of Lucy Pear, the beating heart of a novel that may be set in a historical framework but feels satisfying outside of the solidity of this composition, as the narrative moves with the force from its subtle substructures. You aren’t going to run into any comparisons to Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work or Pamela Erens’ Eleven Hours here. You aren’t going to find any comparisons from me, at least, as I think this is a rare novel, not for subject matter or technique (an omniscient narrator tells the story in order to bring clarity to how all the lives in the novel are changed by Lucy Pear), but for a fullness and hyper-dimensionality that heats up the page.

Though there are always twenty other writers a stone’s throw away, Anna Solomon is proud to call herself a local author. She has worked at the Brooklyn Writers Space for a number of years, where writers forge a community of genuine literary support. Perhaps some of the intense energy of returning to Park Slope after a few brief years in Providence, constantly surrounded here by other writers, has filtered into this gorgeous novel. Pack this novel with you on your next vacation, and don’t miss Anna’s summer readings at BookCourt on Wednesday, July 27 and at Community Bookstore on Thursday, July 28. There will be perry available, an alcoholic pear cider that is featured in Anna’s Prohibition era-based novel.

Stranger FatherStranger, Father, Beloved by Taylor Larsen

Fiction

Who says summer reading has to be light? In this novel about the American family and its deepest, most sordid secrets, nothing is as it appears. Michael wants to have himself replaced. He sees no redemption for his family as long as he is the head of it. Pure language you can sink into, knowing that while all that perfect summer scenery rolls in your view of emotion, memory and family will never be quite the same. This is more than a marriage falling apart, an ode to a fancy house with unhappy people in it, or a man fighting with the fragilities of his own mind. Taylor Larsen, based in Brooklyn, has written a searing first novel that takes us on a journey into the most fearful chambers of our own hearts.

Square Wave by Mark de Silva  

Fiction

Mark de Silva’s debut novel on indie press Two Dollar Radio is a literary gem you won’t want to miss this summer. de Silva, who writes both from and beyond an academic background in philosophy, is not necessarily taking an obvious “cerebral” approach to his narrative structures, though the novel has been noted for its difficult prose. Dystopian fiction is a term that you can leave behind at the beach. If you want rewarding, brain-battering prose with flashes of heart, Square Wave has at its center a crumbling America in which Carl Stagg investigates an assault and prepares a series of lectures about his ancestors’ exploits in 17th-century Sri Lanka.

White Nights In Split Town City Finale cover trimmedWhite Nights in Split Town City by Annie de Witt

Fiction

Tyrant Books is run by Giancarlo Trapano, who has published father and son Lish (Gordon and Atticus) and here we have Annie de Witt’s first novel, White Nights in Split Town City, a slender elegant beast set to cure your summer wanderlust. Not all of us have the luxury of leaving town this summer, but the pages of this novel will penetrate your notion of what it means to belong to a place. Praised by Ben Marcus as a “word-drunk novel,” you will read Jean’s thirteen-year-old “coming-of-age” story that fully possesses the lyricism you would expect from a tale set on the last unpaved road in a rural American town in the summer of 1990. What you may not be prepared for is how strangely and (at first glance) simply the prose disintegrates any ideas you might have about fixed identities and escapist fantasies — in less than two-hundred pages, you will be coldly pressed into dialogue and lifted up into shards of light. Take a risk.

Fran Hi-ResThe Fran Lebowitz Reader

Vintage, Non-Fiction

Laugh a little. Fran Lebowitz will take you there. You can’t always read new books. In Fran’s own words, “Summer has an unfortunate effect upon hostesses who have been unduly influenced by the photography of Irving Penn and take the season as a cue to serve dinners of astonishingly meager proportions.” Revise your summer literary menu with these short, crisp essays on everything from water chestnuts to conceptual art.

Read Any Good Books Lately?

By Filed Under: Books

Something not to miss:  The tenth anniversary of September 11 inspired me to re-read Jonathan Safran Foer’s masterful second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close —a story of love, loss and reunion set in the shadow of the tragedy at the World Trade Center. Since “the worst day” when his dad was killed in the terrorist attack, nine-year-old Oskar Schell has “heavy boots.” Francophile, tambourine player and inventor, precocious Oskar specializes in imaginative creations that help protect the people he loves, even himself. For example, “I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep…” One day, Oskar discovers an unusual key in his father’s closet and it becomes his “ultimate raison d’être” to find the matching lock. From Harlem to Coney Island, Oskar travels the five boroughs of New York City on a mission to find the lock that he believes will connect him to his missing father. Many quirky and kind people help him on his quest including his reclusive 103-year-old neighbor who tells Oskar, “So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds and thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!” A mysterious renter who lives in his grandma’s apartment aids Oskar in another of his secret missions to bring the story full circle. At times hilarious, often heartwrenching, Foer’s book is extremely original and incredibly wise.

Something old:  Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (translated from Italian) is the fantastic tale of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò who on the fifteenth of June 1767 in Ombrosa, Italy, refuses to eat his plateful of snails at the royal family dinner table. Compounding his rebellion against parental authority, twelve-year-old Cosimo escapes to the trees and declares, “I’ll never come down again!” And he never does. “The trees were so thick [Cosimo] could move for several miles passing from one branch to another, without ever needing to descend to earth.” Narrated with love and admiration by his younger brother, Biagio, the rich life of the Baron in the trees unfolds. Cosimo hunts, forages and fishes to provide food, clothing and shelter. Though perched in the trees, Cosimo stays connected to his fellow man. He makes friends, adopts a dachshund, helps with irrigation projects, fights pirates and forest fires, aids armies and even has love affairs. By some considered crazy, by others thought wise, “This [Cosimo] understood: that association renders men stronger and bring’s out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself…” Cosimo studies philosophy, reads voraciously and ponders the ideals of a universal society. He interacts with Diderot and Napoleon. By the end of his life, Cosimo understands “something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men.”

Something for young adults or older:  A Northern Light is Jennifer Donnelly’s compassionate coming-of-age novel about Mattie Gokey, a sixteen-year-old girl living and dreaming on her families’ farm in the North Woods of New York state in 1906. Mattie is a gifted writer who desperately wants to go to college but “ [I] saw what was in store for me: a whole summer of drudgery and no money for it. Cooking, cleaning…feeding chickens, slopping pigs…doing everything that fell on the eldest in a family of four girls, a dead mother, and a pissant brother who took off to drive boats on the Erie Canal.” Mattie astutely observes issues of class, race, and gender and the constraints put upon women by society at the turn of the century. Mattie acknowledges that she is “wanting things I have no business wanting, and what they call a gift seems to me more like a burden.” Against her pa’s wishes, Mattie takes a job at the lakeside Glenmore Hotel where a young female guest, Grace Brown, begs Mattie to burn a bundle of letters. The story opens dramatically with Grace discovered drowned then shifts between present and past as Mattie comes to understand her own life as well as Grace’s. “Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get—a cold, sick feeling deep down inside—when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it.” With a love of language akin to Mattie’s, Donnelly weaves together the yearnings of Mattie and Grace in this heartfelt historical fiction novel of deception, romance and self-awareness.

Something for you and a younger reader: Of his many delightful stories for kids, Dick King-Smith’s A Mouse Called Wolf is one of my favorites. While the other twelve mouse pups had ordinary names like Tom or Ann, Mary, the mother mouse, decides “that the thirteenth and littlest must have not one but two names, and important-sounding names at that…” Named from a scrap of sheet music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mouse (“Wolf” for short) has the perfect name! One of Wolf’s favorite pastimes is listening to Mrs. Honeybee, the lady of the house, as she practices the piano each day. “If only mice could sing, thought Wolf…Then to his total surprise, out of that little mouth came a high clear lovely little voice that sang every note of the melody to perfection.” Gradually lured by chocolates to the center of the piano, Wolf comes face to face with the gentle and eager Mrs. Honeybee who wants the same thing that Wolf wants—to make beautiful music together. From nursery rhymes to classics, Wolf sings while Mrs. Honeybee accompanies him. Until one day, Mrs. Honeybee has an accident and can’t make it to her usual place at the piano. Though small in size, Wolf relies on his enormous talents to help. “Bravo, mouse!” From his experience as a farmer and a teacher, King-Smith creates loveable animal critters. Other enjoyable tales by King-Smith include: Ace: The Very Important Pig and Babe: The Gallant Pig that became an award-winning movie.

In addition to classic and current fiction, Michele enjoys reading many of her children’s favorites. For over twenty years, Michele has been art directing and designing books and magazines for kids of all ages. You can see her work at www.micheleweisman.com