Sometimes you have to follow your heart. Your heart sets the destination and your mind, intellect, ambition, and even your physical body may then follow. Some may call such a thing a mission, others see it as obsession, but no matter its name, James B. Wells, author of Because: A CIA Coverup and a Son’s […]
“Because: A CIA Coverup and a Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father He Never Knew” by James B. Wells
December 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment
“South of My Dreams” by F.K. Clementi
October 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In South of My Dreams (U of SC Press 2024)a part detailed memoir, part therapy session, we follow F. K. Clementi, the author of, as she searches the world, from her birthplace in Rome, to Poland, to an Israeli kibbutz, and finally to New York City in America, the place of her fantasized dreams. Only […]
“Inheritance with A High Error Rate” by Jen Karetnick
February 13, 2024 by Leave a Comment
Reading Jen Karetnick’s bio suggests that the woman is never without her computer and her scribbled notes, her peripatetic inquisitiveness driving her in a hundred directions at once. But this is not a scattered writer. Apparently when Jen Karetnick homes in on a topic, her views expressed as a critic, travel reviewer, appliance tester, cookbook […]
“The Devil’s Fools” by Mary Gilliland
April 4, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Award-winning poet Mary Gilliland has led writing retreats and found inspiration in sites in Greece and Scotland, and as we will see, in the most pedestrian of venues—her bowls on kitchen shelves, the farmer’s field, her mother’s weary body as it climbs into bed. Mary Gilliland’s bows to the smallest of creatures, the most ancient […]
September Read of the Month: “The Smuggler’s Daughter,” by Claire Hamner Matturro
September 3, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Marina Brown A really superb writer can gather all of the ravelings, the dozens of characters, the seemingly impossible happenstances of a novel and, in a few deftly written pages, offer us a revelatory and thoroughly satisfying denouement. And it’s not easy. Claire Matturro has, in The Smuggler’s Daughter, accomplished all of those, […]