8.26.07 Katherine Taylor & Alison Weaver
Monday, August 20th, 2007
Rules for Saying Goodbye follows a fictional Katherine Taylor as she makes her way from a farm-town girlhood toward the cosmopolitan adulthood she imagines for herself. From a Massachusetts boarding school to a dissolute life in Manhattan to a stint in Europe that culminates in a failed engagement, Rules explores the comic undertones of tragedy and disappointment, homesickness and loss, and the dynamics of contemporary middle class American family life.
Katherine Taylor has won a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares. Much like her fictional alter ego, she has burned bridges in London, Rome, and Brussels, but now lives in Los Angeles.
Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Rules for Saying Goodbye
Toronto Star Review
LA Weekly Review
SF Gate Review
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Gone to the Crazies tells the story of a young woman’s search for identity and mental equilibrium. It follows her from her childhood on the Upper East Side of New York City to a “therapeutic rehabilitation” boarding school in the mountains of northern California, where she is sent at fifteen years old and remains until graduation at eighteen. Cascade is more cult than cure, and within the surreal isolation of the school’s mountain campus, she leaves her old self behind, warping into a brainwashed model of Cascade’s mottos and ideals.
Upon returning to New York City in 1996, she is fundamentally lost and begins to ingest copious amounts of drugs to fill the emptiness that has always been quietly present. She quickly falls into a frightening and reckless addiction that eventually forces her to examine the hazy mess of her life and find the sanity she has long been searching for.
Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Gone to the Crazies (pdf doc)
HOW Literary Journal
PlayPhilly.com Review
Want to score a copy of Gone to the Crazies? Leave a question for the author, and if we use it on air, you’ll win!
Oscar Feldman, the “Great Man,” was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject—the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail; an autistic son; and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter—all duly noted in The New York Times obituary.
Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word “sissy” on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin’s long road north towards celebrity begins. 
If, sooner or later, we all face the challenge or the pleasure of eating alone, then Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant provides the perfect set of instructions. In this unique collection, twenty-six writers and foodies invite readers into their kitchens to reflect on the secret meals they make for themselves when no one else is looking: the indulgent truffled egg sandwich, the comforting bowl of black beans, the bracing anchovy fillet on buttered toast.
Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an abusive father—in her own father’s hometown. Their reunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall’s parents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.
