Where is your nonfiction section please.
The Queens Night Market has become a beloved summertime institution since its founding by Texas native John Wang, who modeled it on the night markets he discovered as a child while visiting family in Taiwan during the summers. Up to 100 vendors (historically from over 90 countries) gather from 5 pm to midnight at the... Continue Reading →
Editor Natalie Eve Garrett's Eat Joy was an essay collection I adored: well-known writers from a spectrum of backgrounds and genres writing about their favorite comfort foods, or what that concept meant to them. Her latest curated collection The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone follows a similar... Continue Reading →
Mother-daughter stories aren't always my thing, but I somehow ended up reading three (!) recent memoirs (momoirs?) about just that. One of them you've certainly already heard of: It seems like every year there's one memoir that blows up and is absolutely everywhere (think Educated) and last year it was Michelle Zauner's Crying in H... Continue Reading →
Rough Beauty, by Karen Auvinen (Amazon / Book Depository) March was thick with anticipation—the pendulum between winter and spring, between dormancy and growth—the month of hope, the month of change. Its arrival meant winter was certain to end. By then, I’d had nearly four and a half months of cold and isolation. And although I... Continue Reading →
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy Frost & Gail Steketee (Amazon / Book Depository) Chances are you know someone with a hoarding problem. Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer... Continue Reading →
The Book of Eating, by Adam Platt Eat Joy: Stories of Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett I don't know what it is about this time of year, maybe just because it's when we tend to spend more time at home cooking or ordering comfort-food takeout, but there are always so... Continue Reading →
Book review: Islands, the Universe, Home, by Gretel Ehrlich (Amazon / Book Depository)“Some days I think this one place isn’t enough. That’s when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and have the know-how and guts to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destination.... Continue Reading →
Book review: Bluets, by Maggie Nelson (Amazon / Book Depository) Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse... Continue Reading →
Book review: Kitchen Yarns, by Ann Hood (Amazon / Book Depository) When I write an essay about food, I am really uncovering something deeper in my life - loss, family, confusion, growing up, growing away from what I knew, returning, grief, joy, and, yes, love. Author Ann Hood is also a Laurie Colwin devotee, and... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Baltimore Book of the Dead, by Marion Winik Book Depository People do not pass away. / They die / and then they stay. Poet and author Marion Winik opens this second volume of creative short elegies to departed people she's known, tinged with personal memoir, with those lines from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem... Continue Reading →
Book review: Heating & Cooling, by Beth Ann Fennelly (Amazon / Book Depository) Poet Beth Ann Fennelly writes a collection of 52 "micro-memoirs": mini-essays, a genre idea I love, loosely based around family, marriage, love, sex, and sometimes grief. This book got a surprising amount of buzz upon its release last year, in my opinion,... Continue Reading →
Review: Life Without a Recipe, by Diana Abu-Jaber (Amazon / Book Depository) If the world is water, the table is a raft; place your hands on it and hold on. In her second memoir, Jordanian-American author Diana Abu-Jaber explores the role that motherhood took in her life during her forties, and the wracking losses of... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 