Betty Smith’s classic novel about a resilient young Irish-American girl growing up poor in Brooklyn at the turn of the 19th to 20th century is favored reading for young adolescents, but anyone who hasn’t read it as a kid should read it as an adult. I still think back to phrases from it. Honest. Heartrending. Seminal.
What do James Baldwin, Aaron Copeland, Delmore Schwartz, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Milton Avery, Ned Rorem, Carson McCullers…
I’ve joined the Novel Network, a innovative new venture that connects book groups with authors. On Novel Network, everything…
“Tales from Here and There: On Ugandan Literary Culture,” which appeared in the Millions, was one of my all-time…
