Blume, now 85, says that she is probably done writing, that the novel she published in 2015 was her last big book. She doesn’t get many handwritten letters anymore, though she still interacts with readers in the nonprofit bookstore that she and her husband, George Cooper, founded in Key West in 2016. Some fans, women who grew up reading Blume, cry when they meet her. “Judy, hi!” one middle-aged visitor exclaimed when I was there, as if she were greeting an old friend. She was from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where Blume raised her two children in the ’60s and ’70s, though she admitted that the author would have no reason to know her personally. “Well hello, and welcome!” Blume said.
Blume loves meeting kids in the store too. Usually, though, she avoids making recommendations in the young-adult section—not because of the kids so much as their hovering parents. “The parents are so judgmental ” about their kids’ book choices, she told me. “They’re always, you know, ‘What is this? Let me see this.’ You want to say, ‘Leave them alone.’ ” (Key West is a tourist town, and not everyone knows they’re walking into Judy Blume’s bookstore.)
I know that this isn’t exactly how it happened. There were no celestial matriarchs whispering me away from the brink of creative perdition. But they’re part of me, those women, and I’m part of them. Every day of that magical season their essence was on the pages that I handed to Anne Marie, and when she smiled at me and told me that it was good, that it was true and right, their voices joined with hers, and I knew that I was saved.
They say that print is dead and local news is dying. But in the small patch of Lower Manhattan that is Greenwich Village, there are four local newspapers vying for supremacy. Here, print is very much alive.
And local news is vicious.
When I’m born in May my parents think I look perfect. And I do, at first. But when they look closer into those newborn baby eyes, they see the black and purple specks floating around the white iris of my right eye—a phenomenon not inherited from my new family.
Comparing a brand-new novel against an established piece of media is often tempting, but can be far from accurate without casting a broader lens. Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns has been described endlessly as a gender-bent Taxi Driver. And while there are similarities between the debut novel and the Robert DeNiro movie, the comparison is somewhat misleading. This doesn’t detract from the quality of Your Driver is Waiting, far from it, but distracts from the true highlights of the book. Rather than a propulsive plot, this novel shines for its sharp writing and attention to detail. A closer comparison would be other recent works of literature, such as Sarah Thankam Mathews’s All This Could Be Different or Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl. These comparisons shed light on the adept characterization and social commentary of the novel, while retaining its innate sense of excitement.
Homestead is a beautiful novel, quiet as a snowfall, warm as a glowing wood stove. It's also a profound look at how we navigate one another, and what it means to reveal ourselves to the ones we care about — or as Marie thinks, "How much to be taken, and given, how much to be known, before calling this love, and will it be as sudden as a quiet hour?"
Zernike’s book is a inspiring but often infuriating account of the ways that MIT had discriminated against some of the brightest scientists in their fields. It’s also a cautionary tale of how easily workplace discrimination can take root, even among academics who consider themselves well-intentioned.
In his poignant memoir, “Life On Delay,” John Hendrickson invites the reader to understand his own relationship with words — the ones he says and the ones he doesn’t. A lifelong stutterer, Hendrickson uses “Life On Delay” to communicate the immense impact of spoken word.
Jennifer Wright opens her painfully timely biography of Madame Restell, the notorious “abortionist of Fifth Avenue,” with her final arrest, in 1878, at the hands of the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. For Comstock, a Victorian zealot who smeared his sexual obsessions all over American life well into the 20th century, this was the climax of an epic struggle between Satan’s handmaiden and his flaming sword of righteousness. To Restell, a grandmother in her late 60s, it was merely the latest in a long line of tedious interruptions to her business.