Reviews

At times during my reading of all three of Elizabeth Graver’s novels, I found myself weeping; not because of a tragic twist of plot, but because I recognized my own…

In recent years, we’ve witnessed a minor literary explosion as women writers mine the emotionally rich subject of becoming a mother. Michelle Herman enters this arena with her memoir The…

The Grand Permission is not a book to read straight through. It invites — as does motherhood — interruption. It accumulates, it grows, it overlaps. Persephone arises in one essay…

If you’re looking for a book of poetry that oozes platitudes on beauty, sacrifice, and the transcendence of maternal love, or perhaps a book with black and white photographs of…

Rachel Cusk is a master of describing life’s shocks. In The Country Life (1997), Cusk presents the hapless Stella Benson, whose psychic turmoil leads her to take a position as…

You could not step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you. — Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher (540 BC – 480 BC) Round-bellied, expecting child…

In his essay, “Fires,” Raymond Carver describes being a young parent and a writer: “There were good times back there, of course, certain grown-up pleasures and satisfactions that only parents…

Mary Sharratt is not a mother herself, but she captures the messiness and joy of motherhood with a deep authenticity. On the cover of her beautiful new novel, The Real…

When I told my parents I was expecting their first grandchild, they leapt up from the table to congratulate me with a kind of unconditional affirmation one rarely receives after…

The front cover of Lisa Tucker’s second novel, Shout Down the Moon, with a mother in a sun dress holding a baby on a long stretch of empty road, gave…

“Do anything,” pleads Eleanor Vincent with the surgeon, as she hovers over her daughter’s broken, bandaged body in the ICU. “This child is my life.” Eleanor Vincent’s memoir, Swimming With…