Literary Reflections

In honor of Father’s Day, in this month’s Essential Reading we are featuring books by male authors writing about life, parenting, and coming of age.

For me I realized, Jolabokaflod was an extension of a language I had been speaking with both passion and conviction my whole life. Jolabokaflod is about speaking book.

But that morning, I felt something sweeter than being needed. My little girl was taking wing and exploring her way through a world of images and words, independent of me.

We are exploring the many colors of mothering with our reading recommendations this month with an “in the trenches” novel that will make you laugh out loud, an anthology of…

I am more aware than I’ve ever been of patterns, patterns that have stunted growth and shored up strength, patterns that have contributed to my identities as daughter, woman, and…

I wrote to reassure myself that my kids would be okay. That I could be less than perfect, and that they would still be okay. I wrote to reassure myself…

This month’s Essential Reading focuses on books for children, including a science and nature picture book, a classic medieval tale, the story of a middle-school social experiment, and a boistorous…

That sentence I wrote, to announce the end, said it all. Yes, it was surrounded by other words–accomplishments, family lineage, hobbies–but that one sentence was truest. I’d never written anything…

We love reading memoirs for their ‘up close and personal’ look into other people’s lives. This month, we share three of our favorite celebrity memoirs with you.

During the two-and-a-half years before I began exploring Franklin’s life and work, I’d been focusing on loss—loss of sleep, loss of autonomy, and, above all, loss of identity. Franklin suddenly…

In honor of Black History Month, we are celebrating the words of Black female writers. Delve into Black womanhood, slavery, and identity—all framed by poetry with our staff recommendations.