Given No Choice is a comprehensive history of abortion jurisprudence in the United States. Cody McDevitt’s deep dive examines the strictures that have been put in place to control women’s reproductive health and the work of those who would secure women’s freedom over their own bodies.

McDevitt is long experienced in covering this topic. He’s the host of the Substack “Repro Rights Now,” which addresses abortion as seen through the eyes of the law and the media. He is also an experienced investigative journalist and thus is able to speak to both the facts and their broader context. He makes it clear from the outset where his sympathies lie.

The book is laden with both newsy nuggets and painful personal anecdotes. It begins with the story of Sherri Chessen, Phoenix’s host of the locally franchised children’s show “Romper Room,” whose fifth pregnancy in 1962 was upended by fetal defects caused by thalidomide. Despite a doctor’s recommendation that she terminate the pregnancy (advice she heeded), her employers determined “she was no longer competent to work with children because she planned to have an abortion.”

Given the sweep of the book — which reaches as far back as ancient China, when mythical emperor Shen Nung was alleged to have prescribed mercury as an abortifacient — it’s hard to say which element is most interesting. One aspect of note is religion’s ongoing role in abortion law. It’s easy to forget that organized religion wasn’t always so closely affiliated with the anti-abortion movement. Indeed, in 1967, “a group of ministers…[created] the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion…a referral network that sought to destigmatize” the procedure. As late as 1968, the American Baptist Church, albeit a liberal offshoot of the Southern Baptists, “adopted a policy statement…that abortion was a personal decision.”

But, today, McDevitt reports, organized religion has emerged as the most dangerous threat to both legal abortion and its providers. He notes that “the Christian Right first took shape through the influence of television preachers…Hundreds of thousands of new voters…motivated by resentment over the perceived advances of feminism” picked up the mantle of abortion abolition.

These new recruits didn’t limit their actions to the ballot box, however. Instead, they took it upon themselves to commit violence against those who would oppose them. Reports the author, “50.2% of clinics experienced severe anti-abortion violence in just the first seven months of 1993.” This included physical altercations, blockades, and, on several occasions — such as with the shootings of Dr. David Gunn and Dr. George Tiller — premeditated murder.

Spurred on by generations of religious leaders like Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who called pro-choice Americans “lovers of death,” these terrorists went so far as to bomb abortion clinics, finding “a scriptural justification for using lethal force [to protect] innocent lives from murder.” A group calling itself the Army of God even developed a manual with “detailed instructions for sabotaging clinics.”

We all know the outcome of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which the author covers aptly. More interesting is McDevitt’s exploration of the efforts to overturn it, which involved deceptive messaging from the anti-choice movement. He writes:

“Anti-abortion activists continued to distort the debate by exaggerating the prevalence of third-trimester abortions...public reaction...to graphic imagery could be wielded to sway public opinion.”

In other words, by focusing on rare and tragic but medically necessary late-term abortions, opposition forces successfully created a wedge issue that resonates even today. They then leveraged that wedge by “advancing restrictions in small, seemingly technical steps, [so that] lawmakers could gauge public reaction.” Parental-notification laws, calls for reproductive-health providers to maintain hospital privileges, etc., all seem reasonable but chip away at women’s bodily autonomy nonetheless.

The result of abortion bans, of course, is illegal abortions (between 100,000 and 250,000 of which occurred in New York City in 1935 alone). We visit the pre-Roe, Third World-like wards in Chicago filled with women victimized by back-alley abortions. “At Cook County Hospital,” writes McDevitt, “an entire 40-bed ward…was dedicated to septic abortion cases.” But when the procedure was legalized, “maternal mortality dropped by 40-50%. Within a year…[that ward] closed permanently.”

Naturally, the loudest voices calling for abortion’s ban in early and mid-20th-century America were male. One New York hearing to discuss the issue “featured 15 legal, medical, and religious leaders. Only one woman, a nun, spoke.”

The strength of Given No Choice lies in its spotlighting of those on the front lines of the fight for reproductive freedom, from activists to victims. If the stories of young women like Becky Bell — a 17-year-old Indiana girl who died after an illegal abortion — make you angry, that’s the point. It’s impossible to read the extensive history laid out here and not wonder how strangers could deign to tell women what to do with their own bodies. McDevitt does a good job stoking this anger and, perhaps, stirring the reader to action.

Chris Rutledge is a husband, father, writer, nonprofit professional, and community member living in Silver Spring, MD. Besides the Independent, his work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, and countless intemperate Facebook posts, which will surely get him into trouble one day.

*****

Kasie West puts a fresh spin on fake dating in the charming, summery romcom Stranger Things Have Happened (Saturday Books).

Sutton is already juggling more than she can handle: managing her newly opened L.A. restaurant, traveling to her hometown to care for her difficult mother after an accident, and dealing with an unexpected breakup. When a chance encounter at a bar leads to a bizarre bet involving couples therapy, she agrees to pretend to be in a relationship with a complete stranger to prove that a therapist can tell the difference between real love and fake. What begins as an absurd experiment quickly becomes complicated as Sutton is forced to confront old wounds, complicated family dynamics, and the possibility that her feelings might not be pretend after all.

That stranger is Elijah, the brother of Sutton’s former friend’s fiancé. Initially, he comes across as arrogant (if annoyingly handsome), but beneath the charm is a thoughtful man willing to play along with an increasingly ridiculous scheme. As therapy homework and staged relationship milestones force them to spend more time together, their easy banter and growing trust begin to blur the lines between fiction and reality.

West excels at balancing laugh-out-loud moments with genuine emotional depth, and the unusual premise gives a familiar trope an entertaining new twist. Sutton is an easy heroine to root for, especially as she navigates her complicated bond with her mother and learns that she doesn’t have to carry every burden on her own. With plenty of chemistry between the leads, Stranger Things Have Happened delivers exactly the kind of breezy, feel-good romance that’s perfect for summer.

*****

A murder mystery, a second-chance romance, and a charming beach-town setting make Liz Lawson’s It Happened One Murder (Sourcebooks Landmark) an irresistible June read.

After losing her dream job as a magazine writer, Harriet Baker reluctantly returns to her hometown of Logan Island, New Jersey, hoping her stay will be temporary. But when a dead body turns up at her birthday party — and the prime suspect is the sister of her former fling, Nic Allbright — Harriet is handed an opportunity. If she can uncover the truth behind the murder, she might just earn her way back into journalism. The only problem? To investigate the crime, she’ll have to work closely with Nic.

With his sister accused of murder, Nic is determined to clear her name, even if it means teaming up with Harriet. Their reunion is complicated by old feelings, lingering misunderstandings, and undeniable chemistry that neither seems eager to acknowledge. As they dig deeper into the secrets hiding beneath their picturesque beachside town, the pair find themselves drawn together once again while racing to uncover the real killer.

Lawson does a fantastic job blending romance and mystery in this wholly enjoyable read. The investigation is packed with twists and surprises, while Harriet and Nic’s second-chance romance ups the emotional stakes. I love a slow-burn romcom mystery that keeps me guessing, and Lawson delivers just that.

*****

Annabel Monaghan crafts another heartfelt romance filled with warmth, humor, and swoon-worthy moments in Dolly All the Time (Putnam).

Dolly Brick has spent most of her life taking care of everyone else. After her mother left, Dolly became the dependable one — helping raise her brother, who has cognitive disabilities from a car accident, and her younger sister. Dolly eventually escaped to Boston, where she has built a life for herself and her teenage son, but every summer she returns to her Rhode Island hometown to do household maintenance and keep her family’s business, the Brick Fish House seafood shop, from slipping into financial ruin. When she learns the family home may not survive without costly repairs, Dolly agrees to an unexpected arrangement with wealthy Stewart Whitfield: pretend to be his girlfriend in exchange for the money she desperately needs.

Stewart, heir to the powerful family for whom the town is named, has grown up under the weight of expectation. He’s as type-A as they come, a workaholic desperate to prove that he can take the helm of his family’s empire — even when he doesn’t really agree with the direction the company is headed. After a very public breakup that makes his family question whether he can balance the demands of the business with a family, the fake-dating arrangement with Dolly offers him an easy way out.

What he doesn’t expect is sharp, capable Dolly, who forces him out of his comfort zone. And Dolly, who hasn’t had a serious relationship in years, has built an identity around self-reliance that makes letting Stewart in feel risky. What if she gets used to having someone around who actually wants to take care of her?

There’s no one better than Monaghan at writing emotional intimacy that builds slowly and believably. If I hadn’t finished it already, this is one I’d be taking with me to the beach, because it’s everything I could want in a summer romance.

Kristina Wright lives in Virginia with her husband, their two sons, two Goldendoodles, and a ginger cat. She’s a regular contributor at BookBub and a lifelong fan of romance fiction. Find her on Bluesky at @kristinawright.

Born into an aristocratic German Jewish family, Ernst Baerwald is a gifted linguist, talented musician, and fearless idealist. When he’s recruited in 1900 to become a spy — his cover working for a company that would become the notorious chemical conglomerate IG Farben — his life becomes an extraordinary adventure spanning two continents, two world wars, and impossible choices that will haunt him forever.

Based on the life of author David Baerwald’s grandfather, The Fire Agent is historical fiction that reads like a thriller. It carries us from 19th-century German idealism to the onset of chemical warfare; from Japan’s organized crime syndicates to FDR’s spy networks; from the Nanking Massacre to the dawn of the Cold War. At its center is the unforgettable character of Ernst — a man who has the courage to fight for what’s right, even when the cost is everything. The Fire Agent resonates deeply with our own time, providing a lens through which we come to see, and question, ourselves.

David Baerwald is an award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and recording artist best known for his critically acclaimed hit album with David Ricketts, Boomtown. He will be in conversation with Steve Clemons, editor-at-large of the National Interest. 

This event is free with first-come, first-serve seating.

Hosted by Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

That story is action-packed — when it opens, our 81-year-old narrator is waiting for someone to burst into his apartment to kill him — and entertaining. Helprin’s unnamed narrator was raised by a widowed mother who was just barely able to provide food and clothing for her son. Still, their poverty was never total: They lived in a rambling Westchester County house with a view of the Hudson and a world-class collection of modern art inherited from the narrator’s father, who “never came home from the war.”

He also left them a small shack in the Hamptons, where the narrator spent his summers glorying in the natural beauty of the sea. So he grew up poor and uncorrupted by materialism, but also surrounded by many of the finer things wealth has to offer.

Without paying much attention to his education or adolescence, the narrator recounts coming out of Harvard and forming a Wall Street investment company despite knowing and caring nothing about investments. Within a few years, he is impossibly wealthy, has met Clare, a beautiful woman who returns his love at first sight, and has moved with her and his inherited art to Brooklyn Heights.

There is a dark undercurrent running through all this American Dreaminess, however. There is that father who never returned from World War II, and the narrator’s son, Charlie, who has been killed in Iraq. Every few pages, the narrator refers to his own service in Vietnam, which goes undescribed but seems more harrowing with each mention. Clearly, the world of beauty and opportunity interrupts itself occasionally with horror and violence.

We have been promised that violence from the outset, and it arrives while the narrator and Clare are walking arm-in-arm through their beloved Brooklyn and come across a neo-Nazi attacking a group of Hasidic schoolchildren with a machete. Despite being elderly, the narrator springs into the kind of action usually associated with Hollywood versions of the Navy SEALs and disarms the man, killing him by snapping his neck.

But Clare is mortally wounded in the fracas. Crippled by grief, the narrator withdraws into his art-laden home and does nothing when the neo-Nazi’s family sues him for wrongful death. Since the world is often corrupt and the lawsuit goes uncontested, the narrator loses everything. Even his Social Security is garnisheed. Material goods may be of limited value, but homelessness is still a problem.

There follows a number of adventures — each as puzzling, implausible, and entertaining as the ones already recounted. The narrator survives to find shelter and settles into simply waiting for death and the reunion with Clare it will bring. Until, that is, he discovers that the kindly custodian of the subsidized housing tower he now lives in is under threat from a vicious drug cartel. He now shifts from philosophical Navy SEAL to cunning secret agent and sets out to defeat the cartel with a plot that would be worthy of a “Mission: Impossible” sequel, except that Tom Cruise is too young for the part.

Obviously, this endless, offbeat implausibility is purposeful. We know right away that the sky above Brooklyn was never this blue, that the course of true love never ran this smoothly, and that very few octogenarians can disarm terrorists, let alone kill them with their bare hands. In case a reader is tempted to take things too seriously — skinhead thugs certainly exist, for example — Helprin has laced his prose with jokes and clues to temper the sobriety.

There is, for instance, a running gag around characters’ names. The neo-Nazi is “Werner Warner Weenis,” and there is a delightful section in which the narrator mocks his upper-class colleagues “Angier Francis Dipthahng,” “Hodgkins Chalmers and his cousin Chalmers Hodgkins,” and, of course, “Hutchins Hutchins Hutchins.”

All of this — the action, the humor, and the reflections on the material and spiritual worlds — is delivered in prose that is both vivid and musical.

So, there’s much to like about Elegy in Blue. If you’re drawn to action novels like those from Robert Ludlum, you’ll find much to enjoy here. If you’re partial to thinking about what really matters in life, you’ll appreciate Helprin’s reflections on materialism and eternity. And if you’re smarter than me, you may figure out what the two have to do with each other.

John P. Loonam has a Ph.D. in American literature from the City University of New York and taught English in New York City public schools for over 35 years. He has published fiction in various journals and anthologies, and his short plays have been featured by the Mottola Theater Project several times. He is married and the father of two sons; the four have lived in Brooklyn since before it was cool. His first novel, Music the World Makes, will be published by Frayed Edge Press later in 2026, while a collection of his short stories, The Price of Their Toys, came out in February.

Knowing oneself, then, was both an internal command and an external conflict. What about the ugly truth of bigots? By that standard, being gay meant understanding the long and dangerous history of discrimination, of “closeting” oneself, and of seeking safe places in coded ways.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer persecution throughout history has been driven by themes of scorn, prejudice, cruelty, opportunism, and blatant hypocrisy. Anti-gay laws, such as the Buggery Act of 1533 and its successors, made intimacy either impossible or dangerous. This “offense against God,” as ecclesiastical law long defined it, carried harsh penalties and public humiliation. There was also a cultural aspect, which involved shame, harassment, and discrimination both private and public. Even today, being outed in some countries can lead to a death sentence.

Pride (and Prejudice)

True, things began to transform in the United States in 2003 with the breakthrough case of  Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized queer-sex acts and paved the way for the rights of gays to marry (see Obergefell v. Hodges). But since then, reactionary campaigns have set their sights on taking cases to the Supreme Court to overrule Obergefell and thereby delegitimize the landmark 2003 ruling.

For example, the Southern Baptist Convention has launched an anti-gay-marriage campaign, as have other national groups (see also here). Meanwhile, 31 states have trigger laws that would end marriage equality for future couples if the Supreme Court overturned its legalization of gay marriage. In short, gay rights are once again under attack in America.

Take heed.

Against that backdrop comes this year’s Pride Month, a time to reflect on the past with an eye on how best to continue securing LGBTQ+ rights. To that end, two enlightening books by a new friend of mine, Robert W. Fieseler, are well worth reading. I refer to American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (2025) and Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (2018). For now, I’ll confine my comments to American Scare, a treasure trove of largely forgotten moments in time when homophobia merged with racism to oppress those “others” falsely deemed enemies of the state. 

Since history often repeats itself, the lessons from American Scare deserve our attention, if only to remind us of the evils of bigotry and what can happen when silence promotes prejudice.    

Florida Fanatics   

It all began in Florida in 1956 and continued until 1965. That was when the seeds of bigotry started to grow in a society fed on the worst kinds of prejudice. The formula (still used today) was simple: Create unjustified fear, back it up with exaggerated hysteria against cultural scapegoats, enforce it with unjust laws, and then ruin lives and livelihoods while bystanders remain quiet. The tactic lasted until the evil behind it was defeated by courage and humanity, but it took a long time and many sacrifices.

That’s the powerful story told in Fieseler’s American Scare. Among other actions, Southern state officials met secretly at the De Lido Hotel in Miami. In such places, they conspired to root out so-called Communist insurrectionists (sound familiar?), meaning those with different political views. Soon enough, extra-judicial Florida commissions (i.e., the infamous Johns Committee) employed Red Scare tactics and used the hot-button word “Communist” to persecute and prosecute anyone who dared to speak out for social justice. Teachers were targeted, ministers were intimidated, and civil-rights activists were threatened. First, they went after purported “Communists,” then Blacks, and then gays, along with any “extremists” demanding constitutional equality and freedom of speech. 

Over time, thanks to figures like the NAACP’s Robert L. Carter, the Supreme Court took up the case of Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Commission (1963). The petitioner, Reverend Theodore R. Gibson (president of the NAACP’s Miami chapter), had earlier been held in contempt by Florida’s Legislative Investigation Committee, which refused to hand over an NAACP membership list. The court ruled against the state.

But that was not the end of such harassment. After a 1964 Florida legislative-executive-session committee meeting held at the Algiers Hotel in Miami, 2,000 copies of a purple-covered homosexuality report (aka the “Purple Pamphlet”) were distributed to legislators, police, reporters, educators, and parent-teacher associations. The goal: To expose gays, demonize them, and then let “the purple panic” begin. Lives were shattered, careers destroyed, and families torn apart. It was cruelty driven by bias without any legitimate justification.

Uncovering the Coverup  

Once the dust settled, the cover-up began as Florida officials sought to erase, both formally and functionally, all evidence of their odious handiwork. Documents were shredded, while other records were made mostly inaccessible to the public. This effort to wipe away history might’ve succeeded if not for a paralegal and open-records advocate named Bonnie Stark, who, in 2021, came into contact with Fieseler and secretly shared copies of incriminating reports, the originals of which had been destroyed. With that disclosure and Fieseler’s historical findings and analysis, the Florida officials’ wickedness was finally exposed.

To be sure, there is more to the powerful and heroic stories in Fieseler’s American Scare. Meanwhile, there is a lesson here: Bigotry is kept alive by silence; evil is continued through inaction; social justice cannot exist without courage; and the lessons of past wrongs cannot be learned if they are erased.

Three-quarters of a century after Florida’s homophobic campaigns, the past seeks to reclaim its hold on those who are American enough to march to their own drummers, speak freely, and love openly without fear. They strive, through words and actions, to know themselves in the fullest sense. But to achieve this, they need a true history thoughtfully and thoroughly presented, as it is in Robert W. Fieseler’s American Scare.     

Ronald K.L. Collins, a cofounder of the Independent and the History Book Festival, is a retired law professor and the author of 13 books. His most recent works are Common Sense in the Age of Trump: A Guide to Saving Our Republic (co-authored with Russell W. Huxtable, Amy L. Marasco, and Paul M. Sparrow; forthcoming Aug. 1, 2026) and Tragedy on Trial: The Story of the Infamous Emmett Till Murder Trial (2024). His upcoming book, Forbidden Freedom, is a Patricia Highsmith-like modern love story that navigates between fiction and realism, blending a true tale about the future of gay rights with prejudiced wrongs.

But while Rockwell could generate media attention, his organizational and interpersonal skills were inadequate for his aspirations, and he couldn’t move beyond the political fringe. Further keeping him there were Jewish and anti-fascist organizations that monitored far-right activities, fed information to journalists, and encouraged the government to take legal action.

Steven J. Ross, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, asserts in The Secret War Against Hate that “hate has been a central part of American history since the nation’s founding. Yet so has resistance to hate.”

Any time hate travels to the center of political life, however — entrenching itself in the institutions of American society — more than a few anti-hate groups will be needed to contain it. With this book, Ross has written an engrossing, informative, and timely history of the hate groups that energized the far right in the early postwar decades, the anti-hate organizations that infiltrated them, and the spies who gathered information from (and fomented dissent among) those who hate.

We read of the fascist Columbians led by Emory Burke and Homer Loomis; the Anti-Jewish Party (AJP) of Jesse Stoner, who later, with Edward Fields, established the white-supremacist National States Rights Party (NSRP); the National Renaissance Party of James Madole; the American Nazi Party formed by George Lincoln Rockwell; and the Ku Klux Klan. Aligned against them were the spymasters James Sheldon of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, Arnold Forster of the Anti-Defamation League, and George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, all of whom defended both Jews and Blacks against white supremacists.

Then there were the agent provocateurs themselves: Renee Fruchtbaum, Mario Buzzi, and William Bishop, who became trusted members of the Columbians; Emmanuel Trujillo and Irene Dovale, who infiltrated the National Renaissance Party; and the cagily named Agent BG, who embedded in the Anti-Nazi League.

Jesse Stoner was typical of the careerist haters. At age 23, in 1947, he founded the AJP to insure the survival of the white race. According to his group, African American men, women, and children were to be deported to Africa, and American Jews were to be exterminated — with their “ill-gotten wealth” confiscated for the benefit of whites. Stoner wrote pamphlets, ran unsuccessfully for public office numerous times, and spoke regularly at far-right events around the South. The AJP held rallies and burned crosses in Jewish and Black neighborhoods, hoping to recruit poor, disgruntled white Southern workers to the cause and build a political party big enough to elect AJP members to office.

Later, aiming to leverage the anti-integrationist anger generated by Brown v. Board of Education (1952), Stoner and Fields organized the NSRP to mobilize the many White Citizen Councils that had emerged to oppose the Supreme Court decision. One of the NSRP’s major undertakings was the bombing of synagogues and churches. Although the authorities believed Stoner was directly involved in the terrorism, not until 1983 was he convicted of any crimes. With his incarceration, the NSRP collapsed. Stoner died in 2005, his death, writes Ross, marking “the culmination of an era but not of a movement.”

Soon enough, the haters of the 1940s and 1950s were replaced by, among others, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, as well as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

When dealing with fringe groups, it’s difficult — prior to the commission of actual violence — to assess the threat they pose. Except for the KKK, the groups that Ross discusses were relatively small (the Columbians had maybe 500 paid members) and often poorly run. The rationale for spying on them nonetheless rested on the fear of a united fascist front, even though clashing egos and a paucity of popular support made cooperation among hate groups nearly impossible. A similar lack of information limits what we can know about the spies who penetrated them. Consequently, Ross writes less about the spies themselves and more about the leaders of the pro- and anti-hate groups.  

Given the prevailing atmosphere of political and cultural divisiveness in the U.S. today, the author wants us to recognize that resistance to hate is not in vain. Having given that hope, alas, he pulls it back when he writes, “The reelection of Donald Trump signaled a triumph for the men and women who had pursued a particular vision of America since the end of World War II, the far right no longer on the political fringe.”

Robert Beauregard is emeritus professor at Columbia University writing on politics, postwar U.S. history, social theory, and current events.

This podcast comes courtesy of Biographers International Organization. Listen to it here.

[Photo by Hope Kelham.]

John of John: A Novel by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “The Macleods are complicated. Cal’s mother, Grace, walked out when he was only 9, settling across the island with John’s older brother. This created a deep source of betrayal, but we learn that Grace’s departure didn’t occur without reason. Stuart sets up a family dynamic that’s fascinating in its instability. He has every pin wobbling before a ball is rolled, and it’s in this environment that father and son engage in a soul-wrenching search for identity. They each in their own way experience the consequences of honesty and the significance of rejection.”

The Rolling Stones: The Biography by Bob Spitz (Penguin Press). Reviewed by Daniel de Visé. “Bob Spitz’s The Rolling Stones: The Biography is the first book I’ve read that covers the whole play. Spitz clearly loves the Stones, as I do. I’ve read a few of the classic Stones texts, including Richards’ literary Life and Stanley Booth’s peerless The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Spitz’s book told me nothing dramatically new about the band. But it was a satisfying read, filling in dozens of little holes in my knowledge base and leaving me with that rewarding feeling of knowing the whole story at last.”

Small Town Girls: a writer’s memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf). Reviewed by Kristin H. Macomber. “Flash-forward to 2023, when I was assigned to review Jayne Anne Phillips’ novel Night Watch. Since I wasn’t familiar with the author’s prior work, I did some internet sleuthing and learned that her latest historical novel was set in a time (the end of the Civil War) and place (the hills and hollows of West Virginia) that were both deeply embedded in her family’s lore. Indeed, many of Phillips’ ancestral highlights and low patches played out in those very hills and hollows. I was grateful to be able to review Night Watch with an appreciation for how deep the author’s ties are to her corner of West Virginia, both as a native daughter and a gifted chronicler.”

This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life by Deborah Lutz (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Stuart Kay. “Conclusions have been drawn from her androgyny and boldness — a local described her as being ‘more like a man than a woman, and very dominant in will’ — and from the male nickname (‘The Major’) that she was given. Such questions are left open here. Lutz resists making judgments on whether Emily was autistic, dyslexic, asexual, queer, transgender, anti-racist, a feminist, or an environmentalist on the basis that ‘these twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas and identities don’t import easily into the past.’”

The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Diane Kiesel. “If there were such a thing as a domestic-violence Hall of Fame, Big Red would’ve entered it at 8:49 p.m. on June 7, 2021, when he blew Paul’s brains out with a shotgun and mowed down his wife with a semiautomatic rifle on the family hunting estate, Moselle. Afterward, he established an alibi by driving 12 miles to the home of his dying father and Alzheimer’s-ridden mother, yakking away on his phone with friends and family the entire ride. He returned home at 10 p.m., ‘discovered’ the bodies, and made a weepy 911 call. Authorities were suspicious from the get-go; Alex too quickly suggested to the dispatcher that cops should focus on people who’d allegedly threatened Paul about the boat crash.”

Ten Clear Days by Eric Beck Rubin (Turtle Point Press). Reviewed by Clifford Garstang. “These asides give Mary’s life, and the book, extraordinary depth. We learn, for example, about her childhood in Hungary, her family’s harrowing experiences before and during World War II, and the suffering of her friends. One section recounts the horrific massacre of Jews in Budapest, now memorialized by 60 pairs of iron shoes set into concrete at the edge of the Danube River.” 

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Unfolding in late 2001, post-9/11, the novel centers on Amy Greene, who heads up the Cinema Channel’s PR department. Like sports nerds who manage to make everything into a sports metaphor, Amy filters much of her own world through her deep knowledge of film.

On her relationship with her boss, Owen, she reflects, “I always wanted to be Katharine Hepburn, all sharp retorts, square jaw, and tight lips. I’m no Hepburn, and Owen’s no Spencer Tracy”

Looking around her husband, Jack’s, hospital room, she thinks, “We are being given the illusion of privacy — an enclave behind a curtain in a room with many beds behind curtains — a kind of Wizard of Oz moment where everyone is expecting the great and powerful Oz.”

And while discussing baseball, she and Jack have this back-and-forth exchange:

Why do the Washington Senators sound familiar to me?

You tell me.

Damn Yankees. Tab Hunter.

Is everything a movie?

Sometimes.

All the time.

Heh.

Above all, the novel is a love story. Amy loves New York. She loves her job. She loves classic films. She loves her family. She should be at the height of her powers, but instead, she’s torn. She and Jack have recently fled Manhattan and relocated to a Washington, DC, rental, and she now faces a daily three-hour commute (each way) by train.

Then, at the same time Jack suffers the urgent health crisis that lands him in the hospital, a competing cable network threatens to buy out the Cinema Channel. Suddenly, Amy’s work family and her real family desperately need her at the exact same moment.

In fact, Jack is barely home from the hospital when Owen calls, demanding to know when Amy will return to the office:  

“We miss you, A.,” Owen says, restrained, though in comparison to Gracie’s booming Ethel Merman voice anyone would sound measured. He must have that interior Owen look, the one that says to the office: Approach with caution…

“I want you to miss us.”

This push-and-pull from her boss in New York and her spouse in DC puts immense pressure on Amy. As a coping mechanism, she summons a ghost from her past — namely, her father, who struggled to raise her and her younger brother after their mother suffered a debilitating aneurysm when Amy was 6. She has full conversations with her late dad, receiving his unbidden advice even though he’s technically no longer around to deliver it.

Amy’s work and family are distinctly separate (physically and mentally) but both are equally meaningful to her. So, she ruminates. She weighs decisions carefully. There’s a lot of thinking going on. This makes for a very interior novel, which the author organizes into both extended and fragmented sections rather than cohesive chapters. It’s a unique way to tell a story, but I can imagine some readers feeling a bit frustrated with the slowed pacing at times.

My advice? Put any expectations about plot to the side. In this book, what Bock offers instead is a close study of how career and family can cut ambitious women like Amy Greene in two. It’s never didactic, however. The reader experiences everything Amy grapples with in real time. We’re in her shoes, feeling her anguish over not being everything everyone needs at all times. For me, that was powerful.

In the end, Bock has given her audience a novel about what it means to exist as part of imperfect and messy families — the ones we work with and the ones we live with. For Amy, that chaotic blend constitutes her life. Fans of stories that explore the nuances of the work/life balance — and those who love tales about the entertainment industry — will enjoy The Other Beautiful People very much.

Sarahlyn Bruck is a writing professor and the award-winning author of three contemporary novels: Light of the Fire (2024), Daytime Drama (2021), and Designer You (2018). She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Tomorrow, my novel is officially on sale. The Other Beautiful People: A workplace love story. Or, at least, that’s the elevator pitch. But it’s much more than that. At its heart, it’s about the tension between work and family, especially for women who are not, and have never been, traditional. I suspect now that Jaynie Royal, my editor and the publisher/owner behind Regal House Publishing, which is publishing my novel, could easily relate.

Established in 2014 and based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Regal House has amassed quite a track record in publishing writers from the DMV, and I wondered why. What makes the region special for this publisher?

The truth is, I almost missed the opportunity to be published with Regal House at all. They award the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, won in 2020 by Martha Anne Toll for her intensely evocative Three Muses. I submitted my own finely crafted novel in 2022. No win. However, in a moment of writerly despair, I didn’t look at the email attached to my Submittable account for at least a month. When I did, there was a message from Regal House. They wanted me to submit The Other Beautiful People via their regular channels for consideration. (Regal House accepts unagented novels.) So off it went, and today, I have it in my hands — a beautiful thing.

And now, it’s time to give the woman behind Regal House — which was named Foreword Reviews’ 2021 independent publisher of the year — her close-up.

Regal House Publishing is a woman-owned-and-run powerhouse of an independent press. What was your vision when you launched it in 2014, and how has it evolved?

Great question! I was an author, actually, before I became a publisher. So I founded the press with the mandate to form a publishing house that authors would want to be a part of, one that emphasized community and literary citizenship, where authors have the broader support of like-minded literary fellows when it comes to the marketing effort in the brick-and-mortar space, as well as online (which has only become harder over the intervening years). I wanted to form a press that prioritizes transparency and clarity, where authors are welcomed in collaborative partnership, and where works of finely crafted literary merit are elevated and supported.

These precepts still hold true today, and they govern our day-to-day operations, as well as the manner in which we grow. We were delighted to be named independent publisher of the year by Foreword Reviews in 2021, and our effort since has been to continue to deserve that accolade. The manner in which the press has evolved since its beginning is really in regard to the increasing scope of reach and the focus on domestic and international relationship-building to further subsidiary-rights opportunities for our catalog.

We have a distribution partnership with the fabulous folks at IPG, who distribute our catalog domestically and internationally. We attend the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Bologna Book Fair annually; we are partnered with a number of rights agencies (both domestic and international), who sell our titles to audiobook producers, as well as to international translation; we have successfully sold a number of titles to translation, and we have acquired titles ourselves for translation to the U.S. market. We are partnered with Gotham Group, [which represents] our catalog to film and TV. So, our scope of interest has, indeed, expanded from the domestic market to the international one, with a strategic eye to growing subsidiary-rights opportunities.  

Regal House publishes writers from around the country, but in recent years, you’ve signed with or published many writers from the DC area. Just to name a few, in no particular order: Martha Anne Toll, Laura Scalzo, David Ebenbach, Tamar Shapiro, Margaret Hutton, and Mimi Herman, and (with forthcoming books) Alice Stephens, Rachel Coonce, and Norah Vawter. Is there something in the water here?

It is interesting how we acquire titles from regional pockets of the country in this regard. I think it speaks to cities that have vibrant literary communities, where independent bookstores abound, where book clubs are prolific, where authors tend to build community in support of one another. I am always delighted to acquire titles from authors who will come into the RHP community with that local support from fellow Regal House authors. This is so important, as it not only allows that in-person networking on a local level, but it often will provide each author, upon the release of their book, with a friendly face in the crowd at a subsequent bookstore event.

We are publishing over 50 titles a year at present, so invariably, as we acquire for each frontlist season, we are building author communities on a local level across the country (with over 400 authors already in the RHP family). This is particularly exciting because our strong focus on community means that authors based in New York, for example, will have fellow Regal House authors in San Francisco, Seattle, or Miami, authors with whom they can connect and network not only in the digital marketing space but also to facilitate events at brick-and-mortar booksellers in joint regional book tours. So, that extension of community from the local to the national level is really exciting to see.

What’s one thing you want writers and/or their agents interested in submitting to Regal House to keep in mind? 

First and foremost, we seek to publish works of finely crafted literary merit. We accept submissions directly from authors, as well as from literary agents. While we publish titles across a variety of genres, we are interested specifically in character-driven works that tend toward the literary, works that speak meaningfully to this ongoing conversation we have with one another about what it means to be human in this increasingly complicated world. We are looking for authors who are also generous literary citizens, who are excited to contribute to our community, as well as benefit from it. We are looking for authors who are prepared to work hard to build regional buzz for their novel and who will support our fabulous independent booksellers in their promotional efforts. 

*****

The Other Beautiful People goes on sale tomorrow, June 2nd! Beautiful readers, I’ll be at Politics and Prose that evening at 7 p.m., in conversation with novelist Laura Scalzo. If you can’t make it for opening night, I’ll also be talking/signing at several venues around the DC area in June and working hard to build buzz (as they say in the movie business) via word of mouth. Find a list of upcoming events here.

Caroline Bock writes stories — from micros to novels. She is the author of the novel The Other Beautiful People, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. A graduate of Syracuse University, she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver and poetry with Jack Gilbert and Tess Gallagher. In 2011, after a 20-year career as a cable television executive, she earned an MFA in fiction from the City College of New York. She has short fiction forthcoming in the Hopkins Review. She is the co-president and prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She lives in Maryland with her family.

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Before that, Church had been a golden boy and an equally gilded young man. Later on, changing tastes in art, illness, and the burden of a profligate son weighed the artist down, but he found solace in what he, as a painter, and Washington Irving, as a writer, had accomplished: serving notice that American culture was coming of age.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, where his father was a prosperous watchmaker and jeweler, Church was a compulsive sketcher from a young age — a quirk that his parents found “vaguely disreputable.” They wouldn’t have minded if he’d gone into portraiture, which was “both lucrative and respectable” but were appalled to learn that a drawing class he took as a teenager featured nude models.

In the end, Mr. and Mrs. Church came around. With their support, Frederic moved to the Hudson River town of Catskill, New York, to study with Thomas Cole, an English immigrant widely hailed as the foremost living painter of American landscapes. Church came to share his mentor’s passion for the sky — “the soul of all scenery,” in Cole’s words — and graduated from sketching with pencils to working in oils. So gratifying was his 19-year-old pupil’s progress that Cole arranged for two of his paintings to go on display in the National Academy of Design in Manhattan.

Water soon joined sky as a dominant element in Church’s work, and in a bravura passage, Johnson describes his approach to a seascape at Mount Desert Island in Maine:

“He studied the water carefully. It wasn’t one thing only, he saw…He used fluid, swirling strokes to create the foam of the breaking waves. Mixing a blue-green to match the calmer expanse of ocean beyond the rocky shore, he painted a large patch toward the top third of his paper, making it opaque enough to keep a schooner afloat. With a greener tint laid down in alternating thin and thick strokes, he captured the wash of the water as it neared the rocks. The fogbank in the far distance was a pale violet shroud unfurling over land and sea.”

Inspired by the example of German geographer, naturalist, and writer Alexander von Humboldt, Church traveled to South America, where he made drawings that came to fruition in his oil “The Andes of Ecuador,” lauded by the Philadelphia eminence grise Rembrandt Peale as “the best landscape ever painted.” Church’s paintings sold well, too, often bringing in four or five figures apiece.

In 1857, Church parlayed his affinity for water into one of his masterpieces, “Niagara, from the American side,” a painting of the falls that, as Johnson notes, “[threatened] to sweep viewers over the precipices along with a log that bobbed in the waves.” The falls themselves, however, were ailing. Landowners on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border had transformed the banks below Niagara Falls into carnival midways patrolled by touts pressuring visitors to patronize their employers’ hotels, restaurants, gift shops, and excursion boats.

In the 1870s and 80s, the peerless landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted led a successful binational campaign to buy out those entrepreneurs, remove their “attractions,” and establish a state park on the American side of the border and a provincial park on the Canadian side. The whole effort had started with Olmsted’s distant cousin Frederic (with a c), who had alerted Frederick (with a k) to the Niagara problem in the first place.

The main thing missing from Church’s life was a spouse, and he took care of that at the age of 34 by marrying Isabel Carnes from Dayton, Ohio — they’d met at an exhibition of his much-praised painting “The Heart of the Andes.” The first great sorrow of Church’s life came in 1865, when their two young children died from diphtheria. The couple went on to have four more kids, the eldest of whom, Fred, grew up to be such an intractable ne’er-do-well that his father threatened to disown him.

Church had the wherewithal to take the whole family on a two-year trip through Europe and the Middle East, at the end of which he was primed for a foray into architecture. The result was Olana, his beguiling place on the Hudson. Although Church referred to it as a “Persian House,” the eclectic design also has French, Ottoman, Moorish, and Armenian touches. (Now preserved as a state historic site, Olana is well worth a visit.)

In his later years, Church was flummoxed by the rise of Impressionism. Calling the style “rank in color” and “crude in effect,” he dismissed it as a fad, but it was his own work that went out of favor. Meanwhile, his once astonishingly supple right hand was stiffened by rheumatism, and his productivity fell off sharply. He died in 1900 at age 73.

Early in the new century, Church’s poetic evocations of nature seemed passé, but his reputation has since recovered: The 1979 sale of his “Iceberg” for $2.5 million set a record for an American painting. Church once wrote to a fellow artist, “See for yourself this glorious country, where we reside. I cannot do it justice either with pen or pencil.” Victoria Johnson’s sharp-eyed biography proves he was wrong on that score.

Dennis Drabelle’s most recent book, The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks, has just been reissued in a paperback edition.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT THE BOOK: There’s more to Washington, D.C. than politics. Beyond the suits and monuments, the nation’s capital is a playground for kids of all ages. Where else can you find a hidden slide inside a public library or rent paddle boats surrounded by iconic memorials and monuments? Fairy gardens, dinosaur parks, swings, and themed playgrounds pop up everywhere, offering adventures at every turn. Kids can also taste the world without leaving town – empanadas from Latin America, Asian-inspired ice cream, and bustling food halls.

Museums aren’t just for grown-ups either: create at the Hirshhorn’s art carts or join a scavenger hunt at the National Portrait Gallery. Families can hike Civil War-era trails, cheer at Nationals Park, or step inside a mansion with 80 secret doors once visited by Rosa Parks. Washington, D.C., is a place where kids can discover history, science, art, and more – all while having a blast and making lasting memories. Explore these 111 kid-friendly spots and uncover a city that’s fun, surprising, and unforgettable.

Hosted by East City Bookshop, 645 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

Cynthia Ozick has become known for two types of sentences: the rain-filled kind that flows through her fiction, cakey stream into river, river into venerable ocean, and (across town) in her immortal essays, the other kind — often grim — with which she pronounces on departed writers, forgotten luminaries, and burnished shibboleths.

Inheritance: A Novel by Jane Park (Pegasus Books). Reviewed by Nicole Yurcaba. “The novel offers a unique heroine: Anne represents a new generation of Korean-Canadians balancing two cultures and navigating 21st-century social pressures while attempting to honor their heritage. As a woman who’s struggled with her identity since childhood, Anne suddenly has an opportunity to gain true insight into a past about which her parents never spoke. When she finds a trove of her father’s old letters — which she must have professionally translated because she doesn’t know sufficient Korean — the discovery serves as a turning point in her life.”

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Paul D. Pearlstein. “The author further points out that Israel doesn’t have a written constitution or bill of rights, but that the nation’s leadership — all the way back to its founding — has declared its support for equality for all. Still, the sentiment seems more an appeal to the world stage than an accurate reflection of national will. Israeli leadership apparently doesn’t want equal rights for Palestinians, nor do Palestinians want them for Israelis. A ‘two-state solution’ is a convenient catchphrase for an unacceptable and unsupportable political-legal fiction.”

Ten Clear Days by Eric Beck Rubin (Turtle Point Press). Reviewed by Clifford Garstang. “Mary makes it clear from the outset that she wants to die. She is 83 years old and, we learn, survived the Holocaust as a child. Her daughters disagree as to whether her wishes should be followed — she has a Do Not Resuscitate order in place — but the real question is what the hospital is required to do to comply with Canada’s Medical Aid in Dying law. The hospital is represented by a doctor who explains to Mary and the family the procedure it must follow, designed to ensure that the patient is competent by repeating her wish to die over a period of ‘ten clear days.’”

Tiodora’s Letters: An Enslaved Woman’s Fight for Family and Freedom by Marcelo D’Salete; translated by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics Books). Reviewed by William Schwartz. “In English, writing about slavery tends to focus on the peculiar institution in the Unites States. However, with its translation of Tiodora’s Letters, Fantagraphics Books seeks to do broader justice to the subject by delving into a Brazilian slavery narrative. Author Marcelo D’Salete is Brazilian himself, and this translation from the Portuguese of his award-winning 2022 graphic novel is an exceptional synthesis of grim charcoal drawing with the historical record, dramatizing the 19th-century world where the elderly slave Tiadora tried and failed to correspond with her loved ones.”

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The Price of Victory is the final installment in N.A.M. Rodger’s trilogy covering the history of the British Navy from the 7th century through World War II. This volume starts in 1815, as the Royal Navy has become the preeminent world power and commands the seas, and wraps up with a brief overview of the sailing force from 1945 through to today.

The main character is not Tiadora but Benê, a teenage boy who takes it upon himself to try and get one of her letters to its intended recipient. He feels that he owes Tiadora a debt for showing him kindness. In this modern age of instantaneous communication, Tiadora’s Letters reminds us of a time when relaying even the simplest of messages required a great deal of proxies and footwork. What’s worse, a sender would often have no way to tell whether a letter ever reached its destination.

The book eschews a bombastic, action-filled plot; the backdrop’s oppressive air exudes all the tension necessary as Benê travels through his environment. Dashing from cities to jungles to a plantation, he tries to avoid detection. While Tiadora’s Letters features a plea for freedom made entirely within the existing legal processes of the day, the slave-owning system harbors a deep paranoia that enslaved people will send letters in order to foment a revolt. As a result, Benê’s quest takes on an illicit air.

He lives in a country where life is cheap and murder cheaper, particularly if the victim is someone beneath the notice of the law. Thus, his willful, headstrong determination to deliver the letter seems more foolhardy than brave.

The drawings alone effectively communicate the horror of slavery, leaving translator Andrea Rosenberg little dialogue to convey. (A core irony of the story is that enslaved people aren’t supposed to communicate with each other in the first place.) Tiadora da Cunha Dias’ own real-life story, outlined in the extensive historical notes that serve as a postscript to the fictionalized narrative, revolves around her inability to locate the family she’s desperate to reunite with.

It’s the casual inhumanity of Tiadora’s Letters that strikes the reader, even as the characters seem oblivious to it; for the most part, this horrible world represents their normal, daily life. Benê has learned not to be scared because — despite the oppressive nature of his reality — fear would prevent him from ever getting anything done.

In its conjuring of this impossible (though widely accepted) system, Tiadora’s Letters exerts a quiet power. The story never feels entirely hopeless, although, by any reasonable measure, that’s exactly what the enslaved characters are. Benê isn’t sure the situation will improve — whether the perversion that is slavery will end — but he copes nonetheless, giving a sublime strength to his plight.

William Schwartz is a freelance writer living in Southern Illinois. He has reviewed wide varieties of media, including South Korean dramas, upscale graphic novels, vintage videogame media, and much more.

Co-hosted by Bards Alley Bookshop at the Vienna Community Center, 120 Cherry St., SE, Vienna, VA. Learn more here.

Themes that occupied Clifton during her long career — such as motherhood, Adam and Eve, and her experience as a Black woman — reverberate in this new collection. Edgy and never sentimental, Clifton’s poetry is equally never clinical. Her eye is searching but not cold.

This is borne out by comparing versions of poems on the same topic — in one case, “children lost during Middle Passage, some cast into the seas by their own mothers as a last desperate act of maternal agency,” as Ali puts it in his end notes. Clifton published her poem “atlantic is a sea of bones” in 1987, but this posthumous collection contains the poem “la Llorona,” a lament of:

…the cursed ships that stole away
my waterlost children oh the years
on their fading faces oh the terrible sea
of their names

The suffering of children, along with the sacrifices they demand, are themes that recur throughout Clifton’s work. In books published in her lifetime, she wisely left out certain political poems tied to specific events. But some poems in At the Gate, including “postcards,” age disturbingly well:

our side did not see them
in the search for someone else
an enemy         we did not see the
children            nine
our national pastime

....

how we have made their people
hate us      our national pastime

Some of this book’s poems add little to what Clifton published before. Certain fragments are too slight; we can understand why she may not have wanted them made public. In this volume, a poem about a mirror has longer lines than the final version, published in 2008’s Voices, which has shorter ones and more white space. But, otherwise, the draft and the published poem are almost identical. In “the dead do dream,” Ali provides three additional end lines from Clifton’s drafts:

…some of them are sure
they are sleeping on ordinary pillows
they rise in their dream to haunt the lives
of their heedless kin
they are furious when they call
our names
and we pretend not to hear

In Voices, Clifton cut the last three lines. Ali rightly notes that these make the poem “a little snakier, a little spikier.”

At the Gate does contain some work that is hard to find elsewhere. Some of Clifton’s most poignant poems question her capacity for resilience:

i am learning that even
one such as i
loses hope
i am learning that i
would forget about love
if i could
i am learning
i can not

Others, like “shadow,” sketch her alter egos:

she is silent in the way
that clouds are silent,
something ominous
in her moving.
she has no children.
she cherishes only me.
there are days
when she follows me everywhere
weeping at who i am.

If the poems exploring her identity as a woman are strong, those that explore her identity as a writer are even more so. At the Gate includes a poem already picked up on the web, one in which the poet’s plea to “use me” is, indeed, terrifying:

poets in their bassinets
dream a splendid woman
holding over their baby eyes
a globe, shining with
possibility.       someone,
she smiles, has to see this
and report it, and they
in their innocence
believing that all will be
as beautiful as she is,
whimper          use me, use me
and oh how terrifying
that she does.

Someone does have to see this and report it. We are grateful that Clifton did.

Laura Sheahen is a Maryland poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia.

Is providing aid in dying doing harm to the patient in contravention of the medical profession’s guiding principle to “do no harm”? Does society have a duty to protect vulnerable people, or should we honor a patient’s right to choose? In identifying appropriate restrictions on the act of aiding death, do we risk sliding down a slippery slope? Can a patient even give informed consent when faced with such an irreversible choice?

Eric Beck Rubin’s moving new novel, Ten Clear Days, based on his own family’s saga involving the death of his grandmother, explores these questions and much more. Mary Beck, the matriarch of a large family, has had a heart attack and stroke and is now in Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, where doctors are treating her. With the insertion of a stent, they tell the family that Mary is on the road to recovery.

One of her daughters is present, and her son, the youngest of her three children, soon arrives. The eldest child, another daughter, has just landed at Heathrow but immediately returns to Toronto upon hearing the news. During the course of the narrative, various grandchildren and spouses also appear at Mary’s bedside, providing comfort, moral support, and opinions regarding her care.

Mary makes it clear from the outset that she wants to die. She is 83 years old and, we learn, survived the Holocaust as a child. Her daughters disagree as to whether her wishes should be followed — she has a Do Not Resuscitate order in place — but the real question is what the hospital is required to do to comply with Canada’s Medical Aid in Dying law. The hospital is represented by a doctor who explains to Mary and the family the procedure it must follow, designed to ensure that the patient is competent by repeating her wish to die over a period of “ten clear days.”

The author presents the novel as a record of Mary’s hospital stay as transcribed by an employee known as the Observational Record Author, shortened to “Au.” As might be expected, this record is divided into days, tracking the course of the 10-day protocol. Au. includes everything that happens in the patient’s room: family conversations, doctors’ and nurses’ visits, and the patient’s reactions. Supplementing the record, Au. also explores external sources, including interviews with Mary’s old friends and fellow Holocaust survivors, as well as research conducted by her grandson Eric for his dissertation.

(Eric, of course, is the novel’s author, and the dissertation cited, “Then Cover the Abyss with Trance,” is his actual dissertation — its title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem — about the representation of the Holocaust in modern literature.)

These asides give Mary’s life, and the book, extraordinary depth. We learn, for example, about her childhood in Hungary, her family’s harrowing experiences before and during World War II, and the suffering of her friends. One section recounts the horrific massacre of Jews in Budapest, now memorialized by 60 pairs of iron shoes set into concrete at the edge of the Danube River.  

Mary has made it clear that she wants to die, but questions remain. Her doctors believe treatment would likely lead to near-full recovery. One asks, “Mrs. Beck, are you determined to go on resisting any and all treatment that might be beneficial to you?” She replies, “I am.”

Are the answers Mary gives to the questions mandated by law sufficient to justify implementation of the final protocol? And why, exactly, does she want to die? Her daughter Claire makes the case:

“Being a survivor is not a lifetime sentence. Life is not supposed to be a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”

One of the most touching moments in the story involves a poem by Goethe, the first line of which is also the book’s epigraph: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” Eric visits Mary, and they are alone in the hospital room when she recites this line and asks if he knows the poem. Of course he does, he tells her. Later, another grandson reads the entire poem to the assembled family, beginning, “Do you know the land where lemon trees grow?”

Although Ten Clear Days borrows from the experience of the author’s family and incorporates his own research into the Holocaust, it tells a complicated and important tale of family dynamics and medical ethics writ large. While it depicts most of the secondary characters in shadow and outline only, Mary herself comes alive on the page even as she wishes for death. Rubin renders the fullness of her life — her suffering, loss, and the devoted family she produced — in a way that is both structurally innovative and deeply loving.  

Clifford Garstang is the author of three novels, The Last Bird of Paradise, Oliver’s Travels, and The Shaman of Turtle Valley; a novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction; and two story collections, House of the Ancients and Other Stories and In an Uncharted Country. He is also the editor of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, a series of anthologies of stories set around the world.

Problems in the region began as early as the 13th century BCE, when the Hebrew slaves of Egypt were directed to escape bondage and occupy the “promised land” of Canaan, whose inhabitants were of mixed religions until the prophet Muhammad founded Islam in the 7th century CE. The faith spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim Arabs lived (under the control of the Ottoman Empire) in what is now Israel from 1299 until after World War I.

During that period, only a small number of Jews inhabited the area. The Ottoman Empire was defeated in WWI, and its land was divided up among the war’s victors. After years of rule by the British Mandate, the land became the State of Israel in 1948. The surrounding Arab nations reacted by immediately declaring war on it. A ceasefire was brokered, but the war was never actually won or lost, and many smaller wars followed.

Over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled their homes and land after the creation of the Jewish state. Those who remained experienced a high rate of growth and immigration. With Jewry now protected by the welcoming sanctuary state of Israel, and with the expulsion of Jews from Muslim countries, there was a huge influx of Jews from around the world to Israel. There are now approximately 7 million Palestinian Arabs living alongside 7 million Jews in the region.

The tension between Jews and Palestinians exploded again on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel. Hamas soldiers killed, raped, and/or abducted hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children, as well as citizens of other countries, including the United States. The IDF responded by vigorously bombing the nebulous Hamas fighters embedded in tunnels and hospitals in Gaza.

Israel demanded the release of its hostages. In a tentative agreement that has slowly unfolded over the past two years, those hostages — or their corpses — were surrendered by Hamas. Yet Israel has continued its military assault on Gaza, maintaining that its security depends on the eradication of Hamas. As of now, the conflict has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the ruin of much of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The pictures of bombed-out buildings and reports of starvation and suffering have captured global media attention, unleashing the dormant antisemitism still ingrained in so much of the world. By far, the most incendiary — and disputed — charge currently leveled against Israel is that it is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people.           

Article II of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention provides this definition of genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent [emphasis mine] to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Genocide is a legal concept determined by evidence and judicial deliberation. But Bartov strayed from the constrained academic world and became instead an ass-kicking polemicist when he published his July 15, 2025, New York Times essay, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Clear, clean evidence of intent is the gold standard to prove genocide, but it isn’t easy to find here. True, the world has seen images of the devastation in Gaza: flattened buildings and hospitals; hungry families lined up in food queues; and horrific injuries allegedly inflicted by the IDF. And it’s not difficult to discern intent in the public statements of Israeli politicians, military commanders, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These leaders have demanded the complete elimination of Hamas, the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, and the resettlement of Gaza by Israelis. It all echoes King Saul’s “Take no prisoners” command in the Old Testament to annihilate the Amalekites for attacking Israel.

Bartov’s book is a reorganization of much of the material from his Times essay. To provide expanded context and to bolster his position, he argues that because of the hardships inflicted on the then-stateless Jews during the Holocaust, Israel believes it is entitled to special immunity for its conduct in Gaza or anywhere else.

The author further points out that Israel doesn’t have a written constitution or bill of rights, but that the nation’s leadership — all the way back to its founding — has declared its support for equality for all. Still, the sentiment seems more an appeal to the world stage than an accurate reflection of national will. Israeli leadership apparently doesn’t want equal rights for Palestinians, nor do Palestinians want them for Israelis. A “two-state solution” is a convenient catchphrase for an unacceptable and unsupportable political-legal fiction.

The professor, however, isn’t shy about outlining his own fix. He suggests that many of Israel’s problems could be cured by a vast restructuring. The written constitution promised in 1948 should finally be produced and ratified, he says, as should a bill of rights that establishes those equitable protections that the poets and diplomats allude to. Bartov further proposes that Israel’s parliamentary democracy be given greater flexibility to rein in the excesses of the government’s radical right and left wings.

Such changes might help the nation, but they’re tangential to the immediate question: Has this book proven Israel guilty of genocide? Was the author’s arrogantly simplistic essay title just a cheap attention-grabber, or is he correct that he knows genocide when he sees it? Readers must decide for themselves.

Paul D. Pearlstein is a retired lawyer and secular American Jew deeply troubled by this topic.

This podcast comes courtesy of That Said with Michael Zeldin. Listen to it here.

[Photo by Kyo Morishima.]

From there, O’Hara unspools Maugham’s mythical tale of Death jostling a servant in the market in Baghdad, who then jumps on his boss’ horse and flees to Samarra. Later in the day, the boss chides Death for bumping into his servant and asks why he did it. Death replies, “I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Just as memorable is the start of Wally Lamb’s 2025 novel, The River Is Waiting, now out in paperback. In its first pages, which the novelist rightly entitles “The Unimaginable,” he describes a scene that will haunt his main character (and readers) with excruciating pain.

Lamb introduces the character as Corbin (“Call me Corby”) Ledbetter, who’s currently unemployed after being laid off as a commercial artist. Dad stays home to take care of 2-year-old twins, while Mom goes to work. He begins his day with an Ativan (for anxiety) that he chases down with his morning coffee, followed by “a couple of splashes of hundred-proof Captain Morgan” that he hides in a kitchen cabinet where his wife can’t reach. As she picks up the empty beer cans from the night before, he tells the reader that he’s now drinking the hard stuff during the day and hiding the empty bottles from her. He also admits that he’s doubling up on the benzos. But, he assures us, “It’s not like I’m addicted.”

Mom kisses the twins goodbye as she leaves for work, and Dad hits the Captain Morgan again as he gets the toddlers dressed to go to their grandmother’s house because he’s supposed to spend the day job-hunting. As he informs the reader, though, he’s “pretty much surrendered to the status quo.” Corby’s existing state of affairs seems to be mostly rum-based.

He takes the kids outside and buckles Maisie into her car seat as her brother, Niko, studies a swarm of ants in the driveway. Dad schmoozes with the neighborhood wives seeing their kids off to school and then remembers the diaper bag. He rushes inside to get it, comes back, and jumps in the car. Only when he sees the women waving wildly and screaming — and feels the horrible crunch under his tires — does he realize Niko isn’t strapped into his seat. The little boy is rushed to the hospital but does not survive. Corby is arrested, pleads guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and is sentenced to three years in prison, where the rest of the novel unfolds.

A drinking and drugging dad responsible for his young son’s death is a damning subject for a 480-page novel — dislikable, even despicable — but such is Lamb’s talent that his hapless protagonist compels as much as he repels. Readers might not like Corby and may feel contempt for what he did, but they’ll keep reading this book because Lamb writes with a magic wand.

He seems to have a therapist’s understanding of prisoners, some of whom carry lifelong wounds on their backs as the barred doors slam shut. “The bruises might not show, but they haven’t necessarily healed,” he writes. One of the most significant quotes in the novel comes from the prison psychiatrist, who counsels Corby:

“Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.”

(Lamb seems to have improved on Matthew 6:34 in the King James version of the New Testament: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”)

The author knows prisons. He’s volunteered in them, taught inmates, and facilitated a writing program for incarcerated women at the York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. In addition to his seven bestselling novels, three of which were blessed by Oprah, Lamb has written two nonfiction books about prisons, Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (2003) and I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison (2007). He isn’t afraid to show the ugly underside of prison, including the bullying, the racism, and the sexual violence. (As the well-known saying goes, when behind bars, it’s often “gay for the stay and straight at the gate.”)

The River Is Waiting isn’t a happy book, but it weaves a spell like the metaphor Lamb invokes in its title: The river is never still — it slaps against an ever-changing shoreline, ebbing and flowing as it waits for each of us at the end of life.

Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times bestseller biographies, including Nancy Reagan, Jackie Oh!, and Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with the Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, which is given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.

The novel offers a unique heroine: Anne represents a new generation of Korean-Canadians balancing two cultures and navigating 21st-century social pressures while attempting to honor their heritage. As a woman who’s struggled with her identity since childhood, Anne suddenly has an opportunity to gain true insight into a past about which her parents never spoke. When she finds a trove of her father’s old letters — which she must have professionally translated because she doesn’t know sufficient Korean — the discovery serves as a turning point in her life.

As Anne embarks on a journey of familial and historical rediscovery, she also blazes a new trail on the path of self-discovery: She is unhappy in her career as a tax lawyer, and she’s also unhappy in her relationship with her white boyfriend, Richard, a handsome, well-to-do fellow attorney at her firm.

While sorting out her parents’ financial affairs, her bond with Richard is severely tested. Park does an excellent job depicting the emotional and even cultural chasms that exist between the couple, but the sections concerning their relationship unfold with an emotional distance not found elsewhere. The tone changes, almost stiffens, mirroring Anne’s stalwart insistence on independence and demand for autonomy — even as the latter may cause her to lose her partner altogether.

Anne’s mettle is also tested as she deals with the ramifications of a decades-old, horrible tragedy involving her brother, Charles, who now battles alcoholism and joblessness. The event brought overwhelming shame to the family, and its fallout did lasting damage to Charles’ relationship with their father. For years, Anne has tried to repair the situation and help everyone move forward, even though it wasn’t her fault to begin with.

Despite its focus on the particulars of a single family, Inheritance is, more broadly, an examination of generational trauma on immigrant and diaspora populations. Anne’s parents both survived the Korean War, but neither ever spoke about it nor the suffering it caused. Anytime she asks her mother about the war, Anne is told that it’s in the past and that there’s no point dredging up painful memories. So hidden are the facts of her parents’ lives that it isn’t until after her father’s death that Anne learns he grew up in North Korea.

As the story progresses and Anne’s relationship with her mother cools and reshapes itself, she endeavors to hear more of her mother’s stories about the war. A beautiful moment unfolds relatively late in the narrative when Anne’s mother finally acquiesces and shares some long-suppressed details about her — and her late husband’s — past. The scene’s brevity belies its punch; readers will almost feel the melting of the generational ice.

In its open and vulnerable examination of identity and place, Inheritance echoes fictional works like An Yu’s Sunbirth and nonfiction works like Roza Nozari’s All the Parts We Exile. For women everywhere, regardless of background, Inheritance’s message about independence and being true to one’s self will feel like a manifesto for self-love and self-reclamation. Bravely vulnerable as it dissects silence, filial expectations, and displacement, the novel will linger with readers long after they’ve left its pages.

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, Chytomo, and the New Voice of Ukraine. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press.

Often, when a writer can’t get out of his own way and injects himself into the narrative, it’s to the detriment of the story. Not so here. The English-born Lasdun, a stranger to the American South, takes readers on his journey through the Low Country. Initially unsure Murdaugh was guilty, Lasdun’s painstaking reporting slowly convinces the author — and us — that the jury got it right.

The Murdaugh saga, which riveted the true-crime world, is a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. Thus, The Family Man is a huge step above standard “Dateline,” “48 Hours,” or “20/20” television fare (i.e., the wife is dead, the husband did it, change the channel).

It begins in 1910 when great-grandfather Randolph Murdaugh Sr. founded the family law firm and was elected county prosecutor. In 1940, the sickly Randolph died when his car was struck by a freight train; perhaps it was a suicide to enrich his heirs in the sure-to-follow wrongful-death suit against the railroad. Senior begat future generations of fraudsters. Randolph Jr. (aka “Buster”) was also county prosecutor. In 1956, he was indicted for tipping off a bootlegger before a raid but avoided conviction by intimidating witnesses, bribing jurors, and bullying the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case.

Randolph III (aka “Handsome”) behaved himself, building up the lucrative firm that his son Richard Alex — called Alex (or “Big Red” for his immense build and flaming hair) — eventually plundered. Alex and his wife, Maggie (who was possibly considering divorce when he killed her), had two sons: Buster, who was booted out of law school for plagiarism, and Paul, under indictment for crashing his boat into a bridge while drunk in 2019, killing one of his passengers.

If there were such a thing as a domestic-violence Hall of Fame, Big Red would’ve entered it at 8:49 p.m. on June 7, 2021, when he blew Paul’s brains out with a shotgun and mowed down his wife with a semiautomatic rifle on the family hunting estate, Moselle. Afterward, he established an alibi by driving 12 miles to the home of his dying father and Alzheimer’s-ridden mother, yakking away on his phone with friends and family the entire ride. He returned home at 10 p.m., “discovered” the bodies, and made a weepy 911 call. Authorities were suspicious from the get-go; Alex too quickly suggested to the dispatcher that cops should focus on people who’d allegedly threatened Paul about the boat crash.

The lid was about to blow off Alex’s years of scamming. Days before the killings, the firm’s financial administrator discovered he’d stolen from clients and misdirected firm funds into a secret personal account. One loathsome example involved Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaugh housekeeper who died in 2018 after falling up Big Red’s front steps. He blamed his rambunctious dogs for tripping her, sued himself, and covertly obtained a multi-million-dollar settlement from his homeowner’s insurance policy without paying a dime to Satterfield’s sons and heirs, including one who was disabled.

It’s believed that Big Red butchered his wife and son to engender enough sympathy to get the firm’s suspicious administrator off his back. And it worked — briefly. But three months later, the extent of Alex’s thievery became clear, and he was fired. Worse yet, the police weren’t buying the vigilante-homicide theory he was peddling. The day after his firing, Alex was found bleeding on the side of the road from a gunshot wound to his head. He claimed he was the victim of a drive-by shooting while changing a flat.

Unfortunately, Big Red lacked ol’ Randolph Sr.’s skill in staging a crime scene. His wound was superficial, and the tire had obviously been sliced with a knife found nearby. When nailed, he claimed he wanted to leave his surviving son $10 million from an insurance policy, but his real motive had been to convince police that there was a vendetta against his family and that Alex wasn’t the killer.

Alex’s gothic tale “seemed to be slipping into the realm of deepest noir,” tsks Lasdun. “Who was this scion of privilege with his secret life of epic larceny? This bastion of the legal establishment with his baroque masquerades?”

Lasdun slowly pulls the twine until Big Red’s ball of deception and evil unravels and he’s indicted for financial fraud and murder. Here, the Shakespearian tragedy truly kicks in; Alex was tried for murder in the courtroom where his grandfather Buster’s photo had long hung on the wall. (In an act loaded with symbolism, the judge ordered it removed before the trial.) More dramatically, the most damning evidence against him came from a final act by his murdered son.

When police finally cracked into Paul’s cellphone, they discovered a video the kid had recorded moments before he was killed (unbeknownst to Alex) that showed the family frolicking at their dog kennels, which was the murder site. Alex had lied to investigators for months, claiming he was napping in the house when his wife and son were at the kennels. Unfortunately for Alex, his voice could be heard on the recording. He was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

(In a real-life “Law & Order”-worthy twist, Murdaugh’s murder convictions were recently overturned by the South Carolina Supreme Court due to the “improper” actions of a court clerk who made derogatory comments to jurors during the trial about Murdaugh’s defense case. A new trial has been ordered, but Murdaugh will remain in prison regardless because of his numerous state and federal financial-crime convictions.)

The Family Man first appeared as an article in the New Yorker. Lasdun followed up with this full-length book “to offer a reckoning appropriate in scale and detail to the magnitude of its central horror.” He adds, “I hope I’ve achieved at least some part of this.”

In fact, he’s achieved it all.

Diane Kiesel is a retired judge of the New York Supreme Court and author of a textbook, Domestic Violence: Law, Policy, and Practice.