Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men, focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives. < Back Shadows We Carry Meryl Ain July 4, 2023 Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men , focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives. Beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy, we watch the sisters navigate social upheaval, family expectations, and all the usual aspects of growing up, but they were born in a DP camp after WW2 and are children of Holocaust Survivors, now referred to as “Second - Generation Survivors.” They’ve inherited their parents’ guilt (their mother lives a Jewish life but never converted) and emotional trauma (their father’s first family was killed by Nazis) but they live in 1960s and 70s New York and also have to navigate relationships, career dreams, and social expectations for women of that generation. Then Branka, who dreams of becoming a serious journalist but has been relegated to the food column, is asked to cover a neo-Nazi protest, and her eyes are opened to the presence of Hitler acolytes in this country. Meryl Ain is a writer, author, podcaster, and career educator. She received a BA in Political Science from Queens College, holds an MA in Teacher History from Columbia University, and earned a doctorate in Educational Administration from Hofstra University. She has worked as a journalist and her articles and essays were published in many publications, but most of her career was spent working as a high school history teacher and administrator. Her award-winning post-Holocaust debut novel, The Takeaway Men , was published in 2020. She is the host of the podcast, People of the Book , and the founder of the Facebook group, Jews Love To Read! which has more than 4,000 members. Her novels are a result of her life-long quest to learn more about the Holocaust, a thirst that was first triggered by reading The Diary of Anne Frank in the sixth grade. When she's not reading or writing, she enjoys meeting with groups to discuss her books. She's a lifetime member of Hadassah, a member of The International Advisory Board for Holocaust Survivor Day, a supporter of UJA-Federation, as well as Holocaust centers and causes. Meryl lives in New York with her husband, Stewart. Her greatest joy is spending time with their six grandchildren. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

When her grandmother writes to ask Elena to come and babysit for two children whose mother is "gone," Elena accepts with hopes that she can put off making any real decisions about her future. Through her grandmother's stories, Elena starts to understand her father's remoteness, and as the children she babysits become more attached to her, she starts to understand herself. < Back Among the Lesser Gods Margo Catts August 20, 2018 Margo Catts' new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA, discovers she's pregnant. She considers it to be just one more mistake in a lifetime of screw-ups. Her mother abandoned her after she accidentally set a deadly fire as a child, and she was raised by her cold distant father. She felt loved only when visiting her grandmother, who divides her time between the town of Leadville, Colorado, and a rustic mountain cabin in an old abandoned mining town. When her grandmother writes to ask Elena to come and babysit for two children whose mother is "gone," Elena accepts with hopes that she can put off making any real decisions about her future. Through her grandmother's stories, Elena starts to understand her father's remoteness, and as the children she babysits become more attached to her, she starts to understand herself. "It seems a person is never finished learning about sorrow..." Elena's internal conflicts, metaphysical musings, and reflections on family and forgiveness are all part of the stunning landscape. Then the two children go missing, and Elena is forced to confront the guilt that has followed her since childhood. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

American Scholar is about memory, queer love, first love, and being gay during the onslaught of AIDS in the 1980s. It’s also the story of a famous Harvard historian and literary critic who had to hide his love affair with a man, and who ultimately took his own life. James Fitzgerald is in a happy, open marriage to a wonderful man, has a beautiful young boyfriend, and his first novel just launched, but a letter written by his first boyfriend, who took his own life, sends him into a tailspin. < Back American Scholar Patrick E. Horrigan September 12, 2023 Patrick Horrigan’s novel, American Scholar (Lethe Press 2023) centers on James (Jimmy) Fitzgerald, who teaches American Literature at a prestigious university, is in a happy (open) marriage that allows him to enjoy a much younger boyfriend, and has just published a novel about literary critic, Harvard Professor of History and Literature, F.O. Matthiesen, who was forced to hide his love for artist Russell Cheney during a time before homosexual love and marriage were accepted. The sister of Jimmy’s first serious boyfriend shows up at a book signing for Jimmy’s new novel and hands him a letter that sends him spinning back to memories of the first man he ever loved. James describes his sexual awakening and recalls haunting moments with Gregory, whose self-destructive personality was part of Jimmy’s impetus for writing American Scholar. Horrigan’s novel, which weaves in the study of Queer Theory, Jimmy’s sexual awakening, and fears of the AIDS virus then sweeping across the globe. Horrigan whips back and forth from that difficult time to 2016, when his now middle-aged protagonist is now a professor and published author, but political polarization following the presidential election has inspired new fears throughout the gay community. Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGBTQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing up Gay at the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press), the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail , and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show “You Are Confused”! He has written artists’ catalogue essays for Thion’s LIMI-TATE: DRAWINGS OF LIFE AND DREAMS (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol’s LOSS OF FAITH (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York). His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns’ and Christopher R. Smit’s “Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability” (University Press of America). Horrigan and Eduardo Leanez are the hosts of “Actors with Accents”, a recurring variety show in Manhattan. Winner of Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He has played the piano throughout his life and currently works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he lives. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter. < Back Tea by the Sea Donna Hemans June 30, 2020 A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter. Alternating between Jamaica and Brooklyn, NY, she is disappointed again and again, until seventeen years go by and she happens to see the photo of the man who took her baby. Now he is a priest. In beautiful, wrenching prose, Hemans' Tea by the Sea (Red Hen Press) tells an unforgettably moving story of family love, identity, and betrayal. Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novels River Woman , winner of the 2003–4 Towson University Prize for Literature, and Tea by the Sea , for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine , among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. When she’s not writing, she plays tennis and runs the DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. < Back The Forgetting Flower Karen Hugg August 15, 2019 Planted in her mind while the author was working as a professional gardener, The Forgetting Flower (Magnolia Press, 2019) tells the story of Renia, a working- class young woman who left Crakow to live in Paris. She manages a flower shop for the obnoxious, oblivious owner, who is tone-deaf regarding business, money, and people. Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. Karen Hugg loves plants and is thrilled when new cultivars or varieties are discovered. She is often reminded that “if she didn’t exist, they would live on just fine anyway.” Karen is a Seattle-based certified ornamental horticulturalist and Master Pruner and is also a graduate of the Goddard MFA program. When she is not actually digging in the dirt, Karen likes to write mysteries and thrillers that are set in the world of plants. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. < Back The Anatomy of Exile Zeeva Bukai January 14, 2025 The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. Hadas and her brother Salim, were born in and exiled from Syria, and now Salim moves his wife and children to the U.S. When a Palestinian family moves into their Brooklyn building and their teenage daughter falls in love with the teenage son, Tamar fears that history will repeat while Salim finds commonality in the family’s language and culture. Tamar struggles to separate the two teenagers and grapples with her children, her marriage, and her identity outside of Israel in this novel about love, marriage, history, culture, and politics. Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her honors include a Fellowship at the New York Center for Fiction and residencies at Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence program. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine where her story The Abandoning (an early version of the first chapter of her novel, “The Anatomy of Exile”) was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, The Master’s Review, where she was the recipient of the Fall Fiction prize selected by Anita Felicelli, Mcsweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, Jewishfiction.net, Women’s Quarterly Journal, and the Jewish Quarterly. Her work has been featured on the Stories on Stage Davis podcast. She studied Acting at Tel-Aviv University and holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

"Starling is 19 and was raised in a camper van by a strong-willed mother who cut them off from their community of fellow travelers. Starling, who has never gone to school or to the dentist, knows the nomadic life of trapping rabbits, foraging for food, and getting kicked out by local police." < Back Starling Sarah Jane Butler December 20, 2022 Today I talked to Sarah Jane Butler about her novel Starling (Fairlight Books, 2022). Starling is 19 and was raised in a camper van by a strong-willed mother who cut them off from their community of fellow travelers. Starling, who has never gone to school or to the dentist, knows the nomadic life of trapping rabbits, foraging for food, and getting kicked out by local police. When her mother suddenly leaves one morning, Starling has to figure out a way to survive in a harsh world, on her own. She walks until she connects with an old friend from another traveling family and starts to consider settling into a more conventional way of life, but first, she needs to figure out who she is. Sarah Jane Butler grew up on the edge of Southborough Common in Kent. She studied languages at university and spent time living in France and Spain. Her short stories (some published under the name SJ Butler) have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and her story ‘The Swimmer’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2011. She has twice won the 26 Project Writer’s Award, most recently in 2021 for her poem ‘Flow’, and has performed her work in pubs, a festival tent and a disused light vessel. Starling is her debut novel. As well as writing fiction, she is a copywriter and communications consultant. She lives in Sussex with her husband and two children. Sarah enjoys seeing the world around her, and often walks around fields and woods to try and identify and learn about local wildlife – she has also set up a small village wildlife group for those who share her interest. She has swum in her local river for many years and has kayaked and canoed on it all her adult life. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police. < Back I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975 Kathleen M. Osberger September 5, 2023 Today I talked to Kathleen Osberger about her book I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975 (Oribis Books, 2023). In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police. This was after the CIA assisted coup that overthrew democratically elected president, Salvador Allende in 1973. Augusto Pinochet then ruled Chile as a dictator, clamping down on unrest, journalists, and critics. Those who tried tried to protect some of these dissidents from detention, torture, disappearance, and death were considered traitors and received the same punishment. Kathy Osberger learned all this, but she still wasn’t prepared when the secret police came with a warrant for her arrest, forced her into a car, and handed her a blindfold. They soon let her go, but everyone knew they’d come back, and she had to disappear. Kathleen Osberger earned her B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. from Maryknoll School of Theology, and an A.M. from the University of Chicago–School of Social Work Administration. Her life was shaped by volunteer experiences when she lived in San Miguelito, Panamá; Santiago, Chile; Chimbote, Perú and the South Bronx. In 1987 she began a seventeen-year relationship with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners as an instructor in their orientation to mission program and in 1993 she joined the University of Chicago Hospitals—Department of Psychiatry. Her work as a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist has centered on the issues of trauma and torture. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds. < Back Seven Farzana Doctor November 25, 2020 Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds. Fatema is involved in a campaign to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) while Zainab sees it as a time-honored tradition that must be respected. Sharifa thinks it’s a cruel and harmful injustice, but isn’t at all sure it is still practiced in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect they all belong to – and if it is, she wonders who is insisting on such an outdated practice? Today I talked to writer, activist, and psychotherapist Farzana Doctor, author of Seven (Dundurn Press, 2020). She was born in Zambia to Indian parents, lived there for five years and then in 1971, immigrated with her family to Canada. As a teenager, Doctor became interested in community organizing around issues of gender violence, gender rights, and environmental protection. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community. Her first novel was Stealing Nasreen 2007, and her second, Six Metres of Pavement 2012, won a Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. Her third novel, All Inclusive , was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year. Named one of CBC Books’ “100 Writers in Canada You Need To Know Now,” she has also recently published a poetry collection. In her spare time, Farzana Doctor poses Maggie, her dog, with books she loves under the hashtag #MaggieWithBooks. And in previous times, she loved going to restaurants and travelling. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Set on the Maine coast, where the Howland family has lived for almost 400 years, the grandfather, John Howland, lives in a fantasy that still places him at the center of the world. < Back A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed Jason Brown January 7, 2020 The ten linked stories in Jason Brown 's A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review, 2019) follow John Howland and his descendants as they struggle with their New England legacy as one of the country's founding families and the decaying trappings of that esteemed past. Set on the Maine coast, where the Howland family has lived for almost 400 years, the grandfather, John Howland, lives in a fantasy that still places him at the center of the world. The next generation resides in the confused ruins of the 1960s rebellion, while many in the third generation feel they have no choice but to scatter in search of a new identity. Jason Brown earned his MFA from Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Oregon. He has published two books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House) and Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic). His stories have won several awards and appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Harper’s, TriQuarterly and other magazines and anthologies. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Stories from the new collection have appeared or will appear in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner (winning their editor’s prize and receiving special mention in the back of Best American Short Stories), Electric Literature, Bellevue Review, Dalhousie Review and the Editor’s Prize from the Missouri Review . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

The Lake on Fire is about whom to love, the struggle between rich and poor, and the choices we make about how to live in an unfair world. Although set in the 19th century, Rosellen Brown’s writing, as intriguing and luminous as Chicago’s “White City,” has something to say about our still unfair, turbulent times. < Back The Lake on Fire Rosellen Brown March 26, 2019 Against the backdrop of a gritty 1890’s Chicago teeming with labor problems, filthy sweatshops, and putrid stockyards, two young immigrants struggle to survive. Chaya and her brilliant younger brother Asher escape the tedium of the Wisconsin farm to which their parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Guided by a kind, wealthy young man to the Jewish neighborhood of Maxwell Street, the two siblings, still speaking with Yiddish accents, scrape together a living until they each find a way to reconcile their convictions with their lives. The Lake on Fire (Sarabande Books, 2018) is about whom to love, the struggle between rich and poor, and the choices we make about how to live in an unfair world. Although set in the 19th century, Rosellen Brown ’s writing, as intriguing and luminous as Chicago’s “White City,” has something to say about our still unfair, turbulent times. Rosellen Brown currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, home of the Columbian Exposition, the University of Chicago, and the Obamas. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

When turkey farmer Maggie Schneider is shot to death one morning in 1958, her neighbor and brother-in-law, Amos Becker, is the prime suspect, but he’s disappeared. < Back Well of Deception Cynthia Leal Massey March 3, 2026 Leta Becker was thirty-seven when she married Amos after a fifteen-year courtship, and they never had kids. Leta and Amos are related to lots of people, but their closest neighbors are Leta’s brother, Sam and his wife, Maggie Schneider. Amos thinks the Schneiders use more than their fare share of water to raise turkeys, and Sam thinks Amos has something wrong with him, like all the Beckers. When Maggie is shot while feeding her turkeys one March morning in 1958, Amos is the main suspect, but he’s gone missing. Months pass and some think he fled to Mexico, but others suspect that like family members before him, he took his own life. This is a novel about the harshness of Texas farm country, the hardships of the Depression, and the difficulty of living without love. Inspired by a true story, Well of Deception (Stoney Creek Publishing, 2025) describes decades of drought, difficulties, and deception. Cynthia Leal Massey is a former corporate editor, college instructor, and magazine editor. She has published hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, and several award-winning books, including Death of a Texas Ranger, A True Story of Murder and Vengeance on the Texas Frontier, which won a San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award and a Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award, and What Lies Beneath, Texas Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards , also a SACS Award winner. Her first novel, Fire Lilies , a saga of the Mexican Revolution, was an Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition Award Finalist for Best Historical Fiction and its sequel, The Caballeros of Ruby, Texas , was a WILLA Literary Award Finalist for Best Original Softcover Fiction. Cynthia also won the Lone Star Award for Magazine Journalism for her article “Is UT Holding Our History Hostage?” published in Scene in SA Monthly . The article was also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award for Magazine Journalism. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Cynthia has resided in Helotes, twenty miles northwest of the Alamo City since 1994. She served on the town’s city council for sixteen years. She holds a master’s degree in English from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. A full-time writer, she is a past president of Women Writing the West and a member of Western Writers of America. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next