To begin, Annabel Lyon turns to books. You know you're in the hands of a writer who truly loves storytelling when that happens, right? Sure, she's making a point: "literary fiction is uniquely poised to perform an important ethical function in our lives -- namely to teach us compassion". But
The chapter titles of this work reveal that it's not some kind of textbook resource on crows: Getting Up, Preparing, Reading, Walking, Dwelling, Helping, Seeing, Coexisting, Dying and Flying. Then again, the subtitle should have been my first clue (Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness), that Crow Planet is as much
Originally published almost exactly 32 years ago, the events depicted in "Dulse" could have taken place 32 years prior and will, likely, still ring true 32 years hence. Lydia is a woman alone, not freshly alone -- for she has been divorced for nine years -- but self-consciously alone. Something
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer." So says Edwidge Danticat, in the early pages of the work inspired by Albert Camus' essay and, also, inspired by countless tales of courageous reading and writing and living.
How can you resist the subtitle of Grace Dane Mazur's Hinges? It's Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination. Well, you can't resist it. Not if you're book-ish, and especially not if you're also writer-ish. If book-ish was in the book's index, you might see a reference to
