Ellen Meeropol

Last week I tackled my writing room – moved furniture, went through files, cleaned and reorganized. I had three reasons for this insanity. First, because my heavy desk was blocking the heat source and with the recent frigid weather, I could hardly type in there. Second, I was running out of file space, even with an embarrassing number of file drawers. Third – and most important – I was trying not to obsess about my upcoming book launch. Not to obsess, not to google the book title repeatedly, not to bother my wonderful publicist (who just might be getting a little annoyed with me).

I’m only half done, but the job is pretty much what I expected. I’m throwing away a lot, recycling a lot, donating a lot (someone might want those three-ring binders, right?) I’m not very sentimental about stuff, but I do have filled a box labeled “Stuff I don’t need, never use, and can’t bear to throw away.”

The most interesting finds are the notebooks. When I started writing fiction fifteen years ago, people told me to always carry a notebook to jot down thoughts and observations and ideas. I rarely write more than a paragraph by hand; I much prefer working on the computer, but still I took that advice to heart. So as part of the clean-up, I gathered those notebooks. There are nineteen of them ranging from big to tiny. Thumbing through them, I found sentences that ended up in a published novel or story, intact, like my friend Irene’s observation years ago – “I didn’t take the interstate for a whole year. I couldn’t merge.” – which a character says in my first novel. I also found terrible sentences, and some interesting advice to myself, like “Too sappy; dark is better.”

I also found twelve new notebooks, mostly presents from friends and family. That is particularly generous, since they know that my always carrying a notebook means it’s even more likely that they’ll end up in a story.  Read More 

I'm just home from Winter Institute, an annual three-day educational, networking, and author-meeting event put on by the American Booksellers Association. I’ve been to other ABA events with co-workers from the Odyssey Bookshop, but this was my first time at Winter Institute, first time as an author, and the first time my publisher, Red Hen Press, attended. This year the venue was the Grove Park Inn, a luxury resort in Asheville, N.C. with amazing views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. (There wasn’t room for the 500 booksellers and other guests at the Inn; I stayed at a hotel in town.)

The first time anywhere is confusing. Neither Red Hen managing editor Kate Gale nor I had much idea beforehand about what to expect. “Meet people and be charming,” people advised me. So I made business cards with the jacket design of my new book, and prepared to be charming.

Several things were spectacular, besides the views. One was the galley rooms, where advance reader copies (ARC’s) and finished books were piled on tables, free to Winter Institute participants. Picture that scene: many books, many passionate readers. It was only marginally more polite than sale day shoppers at Filene’s Basement. Luckily, there was an on-site shipping service to send all these books home.

Publishers, large and small, attend to promote their new books and they bring authors to hang out with booksellers and sign books. Those events are in the evening, and they are crowded and fun. There are keynotes and educational sessions for booksellers, and many small gatherings. There is a lot of partying. Literary partying, of course.

Some of the high points, for me:
• Sitting on a rocking chair in front of one of the massive stone fireplaces, working on my laptop and realizing I’m sitting next to the talented and well-known author of a book I just finished reading.
• Seeing my first novel on the shelf of a wonderful Asheville bookstore.
• Meeting booksellers from around the country (the world, actually; I chatted with a fellow from a bookstore in Australia, and another from New Zealand).
• Hanging out with my lovely editor, Red Hen Press co-founder Kate Gale.
• The helpful and friendly folks from the ABA, especially Mark, and Ann.
• Meeting a friend-of-a-friend and making a new friend, the talented and lovely Ann Bauer.
• Watching Kate at the podium, describing my book so that I wanted to read it.
• Signing many, many books and handing them to booksellers; joyfully sending this baby out into the world.
• Feeling part of this wonderful world of books, and the people who write them, read them, promote them, share them with all of us.  Read More 

This morning I read that Beyond the Margins, the wonderful website dedicated to writing and writers, is closing shop. I've loved reading their articles and essays - funny, smart, helpful, inspiring. In homage to them, I'm reprinting below a guest post I wrote for them three years ago. I'm also reprinting it today because On Hurricane Island, the book I was researching in my travels way out of my comfort zone is just weeks from publication (33 days, but who's counting). So, thank you Beyond the Margins, for publishing this essay and for five years of service to writers.

Out of My Comfort Zone: My Trigger Finger

One night, working on revisions my agent requested on my novel manuscript, I realized that my character had to grab a gun and hit someone with it.

Okay, I could accept that, but I couldn’t write it. I’ve never handled a gun. Never even touched one. Never wanted to. And my imagination was balking at coming up with the necessary physical, sensory, details.

So en route to my optometrist appointment the next morning, I stopped in at a gun shop.

The place was a bit of a cliché: on a potholed street in a seedy neighborhood, heavy grill bars in the door, a warning about videotaping taped in the window. The six men inside had military haircuts and significant body heft.

If only I’d brought someone along. At least I had emailed my friend Liz of my plan. Just in case. Even though no one looked at me, or spoke to me, my skin prickled with their frosty attention. The guy behind the counter, a large fellow with beefy arms, ignored me too.

I admit it; I was intimidated.

I’ve been intimidated before doing research for a novel. For my last book I had to learn about house arrest monitors – how they work, what the systems look and feel like, and how someone might circumvent the technology. I asked a favor of a friend’s husband who made a phone call, and a week later I had a meeting with a probation officer at the federal courthouse.

Like Emily Klein, my main character in HOUSE ARREST, I am not at all comfortable with cops or courts. I was nervous going through the metal detector, even just walking by the courtrooms. I kept thinking that someone would put my name in their computer and my 1968 criminal trespassing conviction would pop up, or the misinformation in my FOIA files, where they had so much wrong – putting me at antiwar demonstrations I never attended and missing the places they should have seen. I worried that they would look at me and announce, “Got you. You’re not getting away this time.”

Way out of my comfort zone. But ultimately I was able to use the details of my discomfort in writing that book. And like most other people I’ve interviewed to get background for fiction, the two probation officers were helpful and gracious. I explained that my character had to get out of her ankle contraption for one night. Not possible, they said, but they explained the system in detail and let me touch everything. And while sitting in their office I had the eureka moment of understanding how the plot would play out.

In the gun store this morning, Mr. Beefy Arms was neither helpful nor gracious. After waiting for thirteen long minutes without being acknowledged, I left. Didn’t want to be late for the eye doctor, did I?

Afterwards, feeling braver knowing that my eyesight hadn’t deteriorated, I returned. This time I was the only customer.

“Can I help you?” His arms were crossed over his white tee.

“I’m a writer,” I said in my sweetest voice. “I’m writing a scene with a handgun and have never held one. May I?”

“What kind of gun?”

“I don’t know. A pistol, or revolver. Something a security guard might use.”

“Which one?” His tone was just this side of insulting. “Pistol or revolver?”

I know nothing about guns. And my character isn’t actually a security guard. But I didn’t want to tell him that she was going to hit an FBI agent. Somehow, I didn’t think Beefy Arms would approve. “A pistol,” I decided.

Shaking his head in obvious disapproval, he unlocked the glass case and removed a gun. He did that clicky-click thing they do on television and removed the clip before handing me the pistol.

It was a Smith and Wesson. I knew that because the company name was engraved on the metal. The gun was heavier than I expected. I held it by the grip, my finger avoiding the trigger like poison ivy. Then I grabbed it by the barrel, in the position I imagined my character would use to slug the bad guy.

“That’s not how you shoot it,” Beefy Arms said.

I smiled. “I know, but she’s going to hit someone, not shoot them.”

“Let me educate you,” he said. “If deadly force isn’t required, a security guard would use a baton to hit someone. If you need to use a gun, you shoot. Just saying.”

At that moment I realized two things: first, Beefy Arms might know guns, but I know my story. And second, I was really terrified in that store and had to leave. I had handled the pistol and now I could write the necessary physical details.

“One more thing,” I said, trying to smile. “May I take a photo of the gun?”

He hesitated before nodding.

I took the photo with my phone and then asked, “How about one of you?”

“That’s not necessary,” he said, turning away.

Hurrying through the rain to my car, I could still feel the tiny bumps of the gun grip, how awkward it felt to hold the barrel, the curve of the engraved Smith and Wesson name. I thought about my fear, and realized I have everything I need.  Read More 

I read a lot, mostly fiction. It’s an important part of writing fiction. Plus it’s part of my job at the Odyssey Bookshop, where I serve on the selection committee for the bookstore’s First Edition Club. I read to learn, to be transported, to open my brain and heart to the world. And sometimes I read for the pure pleasure of a well-told story.

In July, I blogged about the books I loved most in the first half of 2014, including
A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA by Anthony Marra
ACCIDENTS OF MARRIAGE, by Randy Susan Meyers
DESIRE OF THE MOTH, by Champa Bilwakesh
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr
REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS by Bret Anthony Johnston
MESSAGE FROM A BLUE JAY by Faye Rapoport DesPres
WHEN THE WAR CAME HOME by Bill Newman

As 2014 ends, it’s time to add more books to my favorites list.

THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO DO: STORIES by Charles Baxter. Okay, I’m a fan, but this linked collection is something very special. Ten stories – five titled for virtues and five for vices – follow a cast of ordinary characters whose connections are both tenuous and strong, both arbitrary and plausible. And then there’s Baxter’s language, which is sometimes quietly breathtaking.

MAKE A WISH BUT NOT FOR MONEY by Suzanne Strempek Shea. A “dead” mall and an out-of-work bank teller as palm reader are the core of unpretentious, funny, and totally satisfying novel. Shea’s rendering of a community in decline – the physical place, the historical bonds, the emotional connections – is beautifully done and full of hope.

AN UNTAMED STATE by Roxanne Gay. Previously I knew this author’s essays and she’s smart and politically incisive, so I looked forward to her debut novel with great anticipation. It did not disappoint, but I’ve got to admit that this book isn’t easy to read. It’s about an upper class Haitian-born woman who is kidnapped and sexually assaulted while her father refuses to pay the ransom. Gay is fearless in exploring family dynamics both during and after the event. Fearless.

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel. This book is on many of the “best of 2014” lists so you’ve probably already read it, or read about it. I’ll just say that I’ve added it to the books I wish I’d written.

ETTA AND OTTO AND RUSSELL AND JAMES by Emma Hooper is an unashamedly charming and quirky journey story with unlikely heroes and unusual demons. In prose that is both simple and lyrical, Hooper’s debut novel offers a tapestry of memory, loss and hope against the backdrop of the Canadian countryside. I loved this book.

WORLD GONE BY is vintage Dennis Lehane. His characters - powerful and broken, brutal and surprisingly tender - embody the 1940's gangster culture, but reveal the layers underneath of race and class and choices not so different from the bankers and high society. As with THE GIVEN DAY and LIVE BY NIGHT, I am both swept into the epic story, and still thinking about the characters and their impossible choices days afterwards.

LAND OF LOVE AND DROWNING by Tiphanie Yanique. The U.S. Virgin Islands seen through the eyes of Yanique’s characters – two sisters who lost everything when their sea captain father’s ship went down – is a place where global history and racism play out in the workplace and the bedroom. Hurricanes and tourism and beaches and war all weave together in this powerful first novel.

And two books coming out in 2015 that I’ve had the pleasure of reading early copies and loved. Look for these in the spring (I’ll remind you!)

VERA’S WILL by Shelley Ettinger. This novel spans the twentieth century and three generations, transporting us from Russian pogroms to immigrant struggles, from family-ravaging homophobia to GLBT resistance. Ettinger's captivating story is rich with social and cultural detail, alive with generously-drawn characters, and unflinching in its political passion.

PLAY FOR ME by Céline Keating. This novel sings! Empty-nester Lily hears a duo perform in concert at her son’s college, she is captivated by the guitarist, the lure of music and the magic of performance. Keating writes about music with the knowledge of a music critic and the soul of a musician; she totally drew me into Lily’s life-changing enchantment with music and those who create it.

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I hate umbrellas, and that’s what I told my friend Nancy when she offered one yesterday morning. Sure, it was raining steadily when I left her apartment. And yes, the rain was predicted to last all day. And yes, I had twenty blocks to walk to my lunch appointment and many more before the day was done. But I had my trusty turquoise L.L. Bean rain jacket with hood and I like to walk in the rain. Besides, umbrellas blow inside out and they get caught on other umbrellas on crowded Manhattan sidewalks.

Everyone else in the city had an umbrella. I wove in and out, dodging pointy spokes and trying to think deeply between raindrops. I was in the city to participate in a panel discussion on balancing craft and commitment in political fiction, a program sponsored by the New York City chapter of the Women’s National Book Association and Pace University. Maybe it was my smart and thoughtful fellow panelists (Elizabeth Nunez, Tiphanie Yanique, Marnie Mueller and Celine Keating), or perhaps the engaged and lively audience, or maybe the panel topic in combination with an essay on writing across racial and ethnic borders that I’ve been struggling to finish. In any case, my brain was spinning with it all. I dodged umbrellas poking in my unprotected direction and tried to avoid the flooding at every street corner, but those thoughts were getting drenched.

So I gave in and bought a $5 umbrella from a street vendor. It promptly blew inside out in the wind, and while slicing my thumb on the sharp end of one of the twisted wires holding the joints together, I stepped into a deep puddle. Very deep. So I stopped into one of the omnipresent Duane Reade stores (the first time I saw that name, I read it as “d’you wanna read," and I still prefer my literary pronunciation) and bought a pair of dry socks.

Getting to my three appointments yesterday, I walked several sodden miles, from Gramercy Park to Murray Hill to Tribeca and Washington Square, then back to E. 19th Street. I was drenched with each walk, dried out sitting with friends in restaurants and living rooms and coffee shops, then soaked again. By the time I returned to Nancy’s mid-evening, those spinning ideas were nicely marinated by the wet miles and seasoned by the long, intense conversations with friends. And I had lost the umbrella.

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Overnight, this tree in our front yard lost half its leaves. It feels like overnight, autumn colors have come to western Massachusetts. That’s okay; I love fall, but it’s such a busy time. Even an overwhelming time. Every activist and nonprofit group I support has some sort of event or activity. Plus, I’m starting to set up events for my second novel, ON HURRICANE ISLAND, which launches in early March. And then there are all the books – there are so many amazing books on my To-Be-Read pile.

Okay, I admit it that I’ve been contemplating a totally forced metaphor about the books piling up like leaves in the yard, waiting for raking/reading. But since my involvement in our yard is limited to watching it from my writing desk, that comparison wouldn’t be quite honest. Plus having all these books is such a happy problem. So, instead of forcing a metaphor, I think I’ll just share the books on my TBR list, and stare out the window at the turning colors.

The Jaguar’s Children, by John Vaillant – I’m halfway through this one
Make a Wish But Not for Money, by Suzanne Strempek Shea
The Commons, by Susan Dworkin
A Story Larger than My Own, by Janet Burroway
There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter
Kindling, by Aurora Levins Morales
The Hawley Book of the Dead, by Chrysler Szarlan
Teach Us that Peace, by Baron Wormser
The Bloody Tide, by Jane Yolen
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
Angels Make Their Hope Here, by Breena Clarke
This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein

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Today is the last day of my summer vacation.

The first ten days were hectic and very full of activity, with daughters and partners and grandkids and friends joining Robby and me in our beloved rental house in N. Truro. After Labor Day, they all left to return to jobs and school. The house is now much cleaner and less cluttered with sand and toys and food and beach towels and the row of sandals lined up at the front door. It’s quiet.

Our first day alone was melancholy; I missed them all so much. But today, day three of the quiet time, Robby and I have settled into a familiar vacation pattern: coffee on the deck, morning walk, reading and writing with a short lunch break, a mid-afternoon visit to the beach to stare at the waves and talk, and then dinner at one of our favorite seafood restaurants.

One of the highlights of my vacation is that Robby and my daughters each read the current draft of whatever novel manuscript I’m working on, and make comments. Since the work is often very much in progress, their feedback – always smart and insightful – helps me reshape the story. This summer I’m revising a novel I started in 2001, and have rewritten more times than I can count. So much of the narrative has changed, but the kernel of the story (two sisters who respond to a political crisis very differently and must balance their loyalty to each other with their choices and the consequences) is still alive, still pulling at me to get it as “right” as I can. Two weeks in Truro means that my characters vacation with us. They share sandy apples on the blanket, walk with my daughters and me at the water’s edge, even join in a rousing game of Settlers of Catan when the kids are asleep.

Tomorrow, Robby and I go home. We return to a very busy fall and winter, with a second edition of HOUSE ARREST coming out in a few weeks, and my second novel, ON HURRICANE ISLAND, launching in early March. But today, we’ll savor our last cups of coffee on the deck, enjoy every sweaty hill on our walk, relish the almost-stale sandwiches and squirt out the dregs of sunscreen. And we’ll smile at the two pairs of sandals lined up alone at the front door.
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I got home last night from a week at World Fellowship Center, a progressive camp and conference center in New Hampshire dedicated to peace, social justice and nature. Summer camp for grown ups – that’s what I called it the first time I went there. It was 1982, I think, and Robby and our daughters drove up for a Red Diaper Baby conference. Over the decades since then, we keep returning, summer after summer. Here’s why:

1. The people. The folks who work there (Andy and Andrea and Howie and Ekere and the rest of the staff) and those who attend. World Fellowship is the kind of place where you can walk into the dining room alone and sit down at one of the long, family-style tables in the dining room, and within ten minutes you have figured out three or four connections with other guests – people you know in common, neighborhoods you’ve lived in, political groups you’ve worked with, passions you share for books or music or art or activism. A great pleasure, if you return, is rekindling those friendships. I was delighted this week to have a change to hang out with Jessica and Ethan and Holly and Alice and Alex, and to make a wonderful new friend, Aurora.

2. The setting. Over 450 acres in the southeast corner of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in the metaphorical shadow of Mount Chocorua. There’s amazing hiking and biking. There are loons on Whitton Pond, along with swimming, canoeing, rowing, kayaking, blueberry picking. Every day, Howie (CEO of the recreation department. Actually, the whole recreation department) offers organized outdoor activities or suggestions for the exact level and length of view of the trip you want. Or, there’s my personal favorite way to enjoy the setting – settling in an easy chair on the huge wraparound screened porch to read, talk, work on a communal puzzle, nap, or gaze at Chocorua. Priceless.

3. The programs. Choose from a wide and rich variety of arts offerings and body movement groups, plus intensive programs and evening events and concerts and performances. This year I taught a weeklong fiction workshop (part of the Mount Chocorua Writers Retreat), and Robby and I led an evening program/discussion titled Writing our Hot Planet. The 2014 summer includes programs ranging from early music to mass incarceration, from Feldenkrais to global capitalism in Bangladesh, from Zombies to Clamshell Alliance and Zoning out Fracking to a ukelele festival and Why Fungi Matter and Theatre of the Oppressed. Whew and Wow!

At World Fellowship, I feel so connected to the natural world and to a community of people who care. I think of it as part of the Commons – the precious public places and heritages that communities share for the benefit of all, where we nourish, renew and teach each other, where we inspire each other and ourselves to go out and change the world.

I’m just home, still doing laundry and scratching mosquito bites, but I’m already thinking about next summer… Read More 

I probably shouldn’t talk about A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA by Anthony Marra again, because I included it in my favorite reads of 2013 post. But I can’t help myself. I recently read this book for the third time, in order to have it fresh in my mind when I led a book group discussion, and I still think it’s the one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I’ll just repeat that it is set in war-time Chechnya and is brilliant and brutal and dark and frightening and gorgeous, offering a close-up view of the worst and best in ourselves and I believed every word.

ACCIDENTS OF MARRIAGE, by Randy Susan Meyers. Meyers knows a lot about emotional battlegrounds. In her third novel (MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS and THE COMFORT OF LIES) Meyers peels back the layers of a family in crisis. She reveals the clashing truths about Maddy and Ben’s marriage from three points of view, in three unique voices. I cared deeply about each of these characters, each searching for a way back from disaster. A veteran of domestic violence programs and interventions, Meyers refuses to settle for convenient excuses or easy answers. This book broke my heart and then began to mend it. Pub date is early September.

Also coming this fall is DESIRE OF THE MOTH, by Champa Bilwakesh. I met Champa seven years ago in a fiction workshop at Sewanee Writers Conference, where we had each submitted a novel chapter. I still vividly remember her chapter about a young Brahmin girl, widowed and shorn and ostracized from life by the customs of the time. It was a hot July in Tennessee and Champa’s chapter was set in southern India. The writing was rich with the smell of flowers and the sheen of perspiration. I still have vivid memories of the beat of the music Champa described, and the gender politics that were so much a part of her story. So I was delighted to hear from Champa that her novel DESIRE OF THE MOTH was being published by Upset Press. And even more delighted to read the finished manuscript and return to that critical time in Indian political history and to the story of a fifteen-year-old girl learning about liberation and making art.

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr. This one of those big books in which you can lose yourself and the present day, and then emerge feeling new and even hopeful. In evocative prose, Doerr gives us two children, a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy, who grow up into the chaos of World War II. Doerr’s characters have unique and fierce intellectual concerns that intersect with the social and political events in their countries, creating ripples I’m still thinking about. One of my very favorites of 2014 so far.

REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS by Bret Anthony Johnston. One of the things I liked best about this novel is its restraint. It would have been so easy for the author, writing about the disappearance and reappearance of a kidnapped boy, to fall into melodrama and sentimentality. Instead, writing with finely controlled prose and emotional candor, Johnston turns that fraught literary trope on its head and dismantles it, giving us a complicated and devastating portrait of a family’s unthinkable crisis and imperfect redemption.

I’ve previously reviewed Faye Rapoport DesPres’ MESSAGE FROM A BLUE JAY in this blog, but want to mention it again here. The twenty pieces in this memoir-in-essays are beautifully structured, weaving together encounters with animals and landscape, with meditations on growing older, on illness and loss. The natural world is always present in these pages. It might be magpies quarreling with squirrels, a red canoe leaving its triangular wake and ripples on a pond, the pure white feral cats sleeping in a hollow tree, or – in my favorite essay – a conversation with a blue jay in the January rain. These essays are lyrical and poignant. They weave memory and yearning. They are reflective and surprisingly hopeful.

I had already read many of the essays in Bill Newman’s WHEN THE WAR CAME HOME before the book was published this spring; many appeared as columns in our local newspaper, The Hampshire Gazette, and I’ve known Bill and his family almost since the Kent State massacre that begins the collection. Still, reading the collection as a whole, I was carried along this river of political passion, through the various aftermath rapids of bringing activism home, raising a family, and infusing a life. This is an inspiring and graceful collection.

I’m reluctant to talk about poetry. I rarely write it and lack the necessary critical vocabulary. But I’ve been reading – and buying – more poetry collections in the past few years. I just finished reading Kate Gale’s THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE. These poems are quirky and playful, infused with fragments and quick images and startling juxtapositions. Gale brings bring oddly dissimilar things together and they fit in surprising and unpredictable ways, both funny and profoundly sad.

Next up on my reading list: THE BLOODY TIDE by Jane Yolen, THIS IS PARADISE by Suzanne Strempek Shea, A STORY LARGER THAN MY OWN, edited by Janet Burroway. So many books…  Read More 

Last month at an event in Boston, I saw a friend and our conversation, as so often happens, centered on books. What good books we’ve read recently, and old favorites. Since we also share a passion for political activism, it’s no surprise that we quickly focused in on political fiction.
“I keep a list of my favorites, I told her.”
“Send it to me?” she asked.
“I’ll put it up on my blog,” I said. “Then people can add their own favorites.”

I’m defining political fiction as work that illuminates injustice by dramatizing conflicts of class, race, gender and the environment. A literature that, rather than the common practice of using the political landscape as background for a dramatic story, is actually in opposition to the status quo. Literature that just might encourage the reader to look more critically at our own neighborhood, our own world, and work to make it better.

Here are my favorites. Some are old; some are new. What are yours?

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown
Little Bee by Chris Cleeve
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow
The Ministry of Special Cases, Nathan Englander
The Guest of Honor by Nadine Gordimer
First Papers by Laura Hobson
Solar Storms by Linda Hogan
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Like Trees, Walking, Ravi Howard
Small Wars by Sadie Jones
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
The Four Gated City by Doris Lessing
The Chosen Place; The Timeless People by Paule Marshall
White Dog Fell from the Sky, Eleanor Morse
A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher
The Last Town on Earth, Thomas Mullen
Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien
Strange as this Weather has Been, Ann Pancake
Caucasia by Danzy Senna
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Ties in Blood by Gillian Slovo
The Submission, Amy Waldman
Martyrs Crossing by Amy Wilentz


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