Book Quote: “He wants it each way. Both ways. All the ways. He wants his marriage solved, and he wants to be on the road with Rena, one of the undersea creatures strapped to the luggage rack, Yul Brynner with his head out the window, licking the air. He wants the Beanbags to smile, shake their heads, look at Hendrick’s charts and tell them ‘We’ve never…  Read More →

Book Quote: “On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives. ‘I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,’ she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back. Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished.”... 

Book Quote: “This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never... 

Book Quote: “But you will never get there,” she whispers. “Some swaggering lout among the Greeks would strike you down before you got even halfway to the camp. Think of it. Two old men in a cart laden with gold? Do you suppose your grey hairs would save you?” “No,” he admits. “But the gods might. If it was their intention that I get there.” Book Review: Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 23, 2010)... 

Book Quote: “But it’s all. . .broke. We’re broke, Lisa and me-something important cracked in us. And I have no idea how to fix it, any more than I know how to keep from losing our house, or for that matter, how to build a tree fort.” Book Review: Review by Danielle Bullen and Judi Clark (DEC 30, 2009) In The Financial Lives of the Poets , author Jess Walter …  Read More →

Book Quote: “I looked up at her, grinning and beautiful and terrified and happy, and felt not the same old “time is fleeting and we are all mortal” but something finer and simpler and harder even to bear in mind. This is our life happening, I told her, or would have told her if I could have caught my breath long enough to say it over the clamor of the clarinet and fiddle, and …  Read More →

Book Quote: “Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just the way it is.” Book Review: Review by Doug Bruns (NOV 27, 2009) Set in Australia, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice , skillfully tracks two narratives, each struggling to escape fateful trajectories. One, the story of Leon, traces his arrival on the continent, the child of European immigrants in the 1950s. Leon, his mother and father set …  Read More →