As a young black boy in Brooklyn, James McBride wondered why his mother looked different. When he asked her if she was white or black, she would answer, "I'm light-skinned." Finally, when he had become an adult, she told him her story. She was a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland, raised in the American South. McBride's tribute, now published in a 10th anniversary edition, has become a classic in healthy race relations, a topic we are all apparently still learning.
When Stephanie Land started working on the pages that would become her debut memoir, Maid, she didn’t know those drafts would become a bestselling book or the basis for a hit Netflix series produced by John Wells, but she did know she wanted to tell the truth about her life. Our conversations about poverty and […]
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a rich, multidimensional story of family, love and summer stock theater. Patchett joins us to talk about the wealth of influences that inspired this novel, wanting to write a happy book, being an author and a bookseller and more. Jimin Han’s The Apology follows a surprising and funny 105-year-old […]
The author of The Good Lord Bird talks about John Brown, Coltrane, and writing from the uncomfortable chair.
Making the choice to have children, as the novelist Elizabeth Stone once said, “is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” In my case, my husband and I can spend a harrowing day feeding, bathing, changing, playing with, and cajoling to sleep our 18-month-old and then […]