“I like a well-turned story,” says Patrick Radden Keefe. “I try to write stories that are engaging, the kinds of stories that you might not have an interest in at […]
Books & Poetry
BOOK REVIEW
Understanding The Man Who Ate Too Much
A biography of James Beard takes on new pandemic meaning
About a month ago, my husband Christopher and I were invited to dinner at my in-laws — our first dinner party since the world fell apart last year. While enjoying […]
COMIC STRIP ART
Karl Stevens Turns His Penny Strip Into a Graphic Memoir
The book’s peerlessly inked pages are on view in Provincetown
Most anyone who spends time with a cat will ask what goes on behind the impenetrable stare of its almond-shaped eyes. The Boston-based comic artist and painter Karl Stevens posits […]
BOOK REVIEW
Reassuring the First-Time Gardener
Jessica Sowards’s book is the cure for ‘analysis paralysis’
Sometime in the last year, as one does in a pandemic, I began cleaning drawers. Among the items that I found were unopened packets of seeds. Columbines I’d bought when […]
WRITERS
Hanif Abdurraqib Extols Black Performance
He joins a local reading and talk with Patricia Spears Jones
“I owe Provincetown a great creative debt,” says the poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib. He wrote most of his second book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Tranquility in Water, Wood, and Wild Things
Hannah Kirshner combines drawings, recipes, and personal memoir
Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese government made it difficult for outsiders to explore the country. Even with rapid industrialization and modernization, Japan remained a hard place for […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Order in the Chaos of Fractals
Oliver Linton’s book is not for the number-phobic
I don’t know what I was expecting when I requested a reviewer’s copy of Oliver Linton’s Fractals: On the Edge of Chaos. The pocket-sized book, published in February, appeared to […]
AUTHORS
Revealing the Intimacy of Sex With Strangers
Michael Lowenthal explores the nexus of love, loneliness, and desire
“Intimacy is about the experience of saying to another person — not necessarily in words — ‘This is who truly I am and what I want. Who are you? What […]
BOOK REVIEW
Once Behind Bars, Forever Barred Entry
Reuben Jonathan Miller reckons with America’s ‘carceral system’
Michelle Alexander changed conversations about race-based discrimination in 2010 when she published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander explained that four in five Black […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Talented but Deplorable Patricia Highsmith
A new biography depicts a deeply flawed human being
In most biographies, the subject begins as a larger-than-life figure. Then, after we learn about imperfect relationships and personal quirks, he or she becomes more human. That’s not the case […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Colonial America, Thomas Morton Took the Pure out of Puritan
A new book examines a rebel antihero among the religious exiles
In the book of Joshua, the ancient Israelites settle upon the land that God had promised them, a land called Canaan, and they do so without slaughtering any of the […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Mothers Behind the Civil Rights Movement
Anna Malaika Tubbs gives their story a Black feminist affirmation
It is easy to pan Anna Malaika Tubbs’s The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, released last month […]
METAPHYSICS: PERSONAL HISTORY
Ending Where You Began
A journey without travel: irony and contradictions
…I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again youth’s dumb green fields come […]
AUTHORS
Remembrance of Serial Murders Past
The Babysitter is part memoir, part investigative report about Tony Costa
Sixteen years ago, a nightmare Liza Rodman had been having for months suddenly got real. She finally recognized the face of the man who approached her in the dream — […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Survivors Is Jane Harper at Her Criminal Best
An Aussie mystery with echoes of the Outer Cape
If you are in need of a particularly good escape that requires no travel this pandemic February, look no further than Australian crime writer Jane Harper’s latest whodunit, The Survivors, […]
