Lacy Fewer inherited sacks of letters from a great aunt who emigrated from Ireland to America in 1908 and turned the letters into a novel. < Back Yankeeland Lacy Fewer July 8, 2025 It’s the early 1900s and Brigid is restricted by straightlaced Irish society and a difficult stepmother, but her father is loving and supportive. She and her cousin Molly dream of life in Yankeeland, a.k.a. America, but only Brigid gets the chance once she’s married, and a lifetime of correspondence follows. While Molly thrives back in Ireland, Brigid’s dream of having a child leads to unexpected problems in a society that values women for their childbearing capabilities. With little to no help available for the problem of infertility, her mental health suffers. Irish author Lacy Fewer based this moving historical story on the letters she inherited from her great-aunt who emigrated in 1908. Lacy Fewer is the recipient of the Literary Titan Book Award for her debut novel Yankeeland , a powerful story of family secrets and societal change. Fewer, born and raised in Ireland, has nearly three decades of experience working in the financial services sector. She earned numerous degrees and certifications, including: QFA from Institute of Bankers; CFP master’s degree from them as well; a Master of Science in Financial Planning and Services, and then a professional diploma in Fintech, both from University of College in Dublin. She recently earned a Certificate in ESG Investing from CFA. Fewer enjoys theatre, reading literature, storytelling, travel and studying history. A proud Dubliner, she resides, with her husband, in a small village close to Dublin City, in Co. Meath. They have three children. You can find her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/annmarie-lacy-fewer . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Sixteen-year-old Leni O’Hare loves her horse, so when her mother tries to sell it, she rides as far as she can. It’s 1972, and she ends up falling in love with another horse-lover. < Back Because I Loved You Donnaldson Brown April 11, 2023 Today I talked to Donnaldson Brown about her new novel Because I Loved You (She Writes Press 2023). Sixteen-year-old Leni O’Hare loves her horse, so when her mother tries to sell it, she rides as far as she can. It’s 1972, and she ends up falling in love with another horse-lover. Seventeen-year-old Caleb McGrath plays football with Leni’s beloved older brother Foy, and dreams of a future far from East Texas. Leni and Caleb fall in love and make the plans of young lovers, but they’re both torn between their desire and following their dreams. Tragedy strikes and turns everyone’s world apart, Caleb’s brother Hank has just returned from Vietnam filled with rage, and Leni needs Hank’s help to escape. Leni and Caleb build their lives separately until they’re pulled together again in New York City in the 1980s. Passion isn’t quite enough in this wide-ranging tale of young love, consequences, and finding home. An attorney and former screenwriter, Donnaldson Brown ran the New York office of Robert Redford’s film development company for several years. A student of theater (and clowning), her spoken word pieces have been accepted for performance by The Deep Listening Institute’s Writers in Performance and Women & Identity Festivals in New York City, and in the Made in the Berkshires Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She’s been awarded multiple residencies. She is a longtime resident of both Brooklyn, New York, and western Massachusetts, and grew up riding horses on a family ranch in northeast Texas and in her native Connecticut. Ms. Brown is currently a facilitator and trainer with The Equus Effect, offering somatic based experiential learning with horses for veterans, first responders and others struggling with post-traumatic stress injuries. She is certified to teach meditation and several forms of yoga. Ms. Brown is also a proud mother who loves to sing, and cycle, and hike with her dogs. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Only 4 ingredients and great for last minute cookies anytime of year, but I make these during Passover, when we don't use flour or leavening of any kind. < Back Chocolate Passover Cookies April 5, 2023 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: About 12 minutes, remove from oven, cool about 15 minutes before tasting. Serves: 18 Cookies Tags: Cookies and Brownies About the Recipe These cookies are also good for dipping in the chocolate sauce that I usually serve with dessert - Ingredients 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla extract 2 cups fine almond flour Preparation Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C and line two baking pans. In a medium glass bowl, microwave the chocolate chips 1 minute, stir. Microwave an additional minute. Stir until smooth. Crack the eggs into a small bowl and add the vanilla extract. Stir to break up yolks. Add egg mixture to melted chocolate and stir (don't stop stirring until mixture is smooth). Add almond flour to mixture and stir until blended. Pour tablespoonfuls on the lined pans, leave room for them to spread. Optional: sprinkle an additional 1/4 cup of chocolate chips into the mixture before pouring spoonfuls onto the baking pan. You could also add 1/4 cup of sugar (when you add the almond flour) for a sweeter cookie, although we like them just the way they are! Previous Next

It's so delicious! You can use fresh dill or fresh mint for this perfect dip! < Back Zucchini Dip/Sauce September 17, 2019 Prep Time: 15 Minutes Cook Time: 10 Minutes Serves: 30 Servings Tags: Dips and Sauces, Vegan, Vegetarian About the Recipe p.227 Battered: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery The community room was the size of two full apartments, so it was a great place to take children when it was too cold or hot to play outside. Noah was already on his fourth trip around the room. She let him watch one more crack of lightening and make one more run around the room before announcing that it was time to go back home to prepare dinner. An hour later, the smell of tomato pesto soup and fresh bread filled the apartment as Quinn set the table, Noah poured the water, and Sierra placed the butter plate and a bowl of zucchini-dill dip on the table. They all sat down, and Alene was happy to get through dinner without a single argument. The kids finished quickly as usual, and Alene stayed at the table to keep her father company. It took him a long time to eat his meal. “Dad,” said Alene, “do you remember hearing anything about Gary hiding money that Joan embezzled from her company? Ingredients 1 small or medium zucchini, cut into pieces w/skin 2 or 3 cloves garlic Olive oil spray for the pan Juice of ½ small lemon (about 2 TBSPs) ¼ cup water (if you want to use this as salad dressing, use EVOO instead) 1/3 cup golden raisins (you can use honey, agave, or brown sugar – don’t use dark raisins) 2 TBSP tahini (or use 1 TBSP sesame seeds + ¼ cup water) ¼ tsp each: salt, pepper ½ tsp each: cumin, coriander, turmeric 1 tsp dried basil 1/2 oz (about a handful) of fresh mint Preparation Sauté zucchini and garlic in hot, sprayed pan until lightly browned (5-7 minutes). Add everything to blender and process until smooth. Season to taste (add more salt or if you like it sweeter, add 1 tsp of honey or agave. Makes about 1 ½ cups (serve with everything!) Previous Next

Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. < Back Dreaming in Spanish Sara Alvarado June 6, 2023 In Dreaming in Spanish: An Unexpected Love Story In Puerto Vallarta (Little Creek Press, 2023), Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. She’s honest about her struggle to overcome her weaknesses, her relationships, and her addictions at the age of twenty-four. In 1999, with $10,000 from her grandmother’s will, her goal is to live near a Mexican beach and get her act together. She commits to six months of celibacy and vows to avoid her previously reckless, party lifestyle in favor of reading, meditating, and getting healthy. Sara Alvarado is a writer, speaker, and fierce advocate for racial equity in real estate. She is the co-founder of OWN IT: Building Black Wealth, co-owner of Alvarado Real Estate Group, author of the Racial Justice Toolkit for Real Estate Professionals (2020), A Guide for Change Agents (2016), and creator of the Conversation Challenge: helping white people talk about race. Sara has also had numerous essays and articles published in Madison365, HuffPost, and Scary Mommy. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis with a BA in Spanish and feels most at home in Madison, WI. and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Sara is a lover of love, spirit, dance, and adventure (with the music turned up), and enjoys traveling, challenging the status quo, and writing. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. < Back Reinhardt's Garden Mark Haber April 1, 2020 Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Carried in circles through the jungle on a stretcher, the narrator recalls how Reinhardt fueled himself with copious amounts of cocaine, built himself an outrageous castle with fake walls and trap doors, and cared nothing for the safety of those those around him, including Ulrich the dog killer, Sonja the one-legged former prostitute, and the unnamed narrator himself. The only thing that really mattered to Reinhardt, according to his amanuensis, was his search for the essence of melancholy. Mark Haber is the author of Reinhardt's Garden (Coffee House Press, 2019). He was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions , was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel and was listed as one of the Texas Observer ’s Best Texas Books of the Decade. He lives in Houston, Texas, loves reading and Vietnamese soup, and is operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024). < Back Blood on the Brain Esinam Bediako October 8, 2024 When Akosua, a 24-year-old grad student in New York, falls and bangs her head, she has too much drama in her life to pay attention to her headaches and exhaustion. She’s just broken up with Wisdom, her boyfriend, she learns that her long-estranged Ghanian father is in New York, and she’s worried that dropping so many graduate classes means that she’ll lose her scholarship and work-study job in the library (where she met Daniel, her new crush). As she grapples with her Ghanian-American identity, her mother’s wishes for her, her troubled relationship with the father who left when she was a child, and her coursework, Akosua’s head injury worsens, and she wakes up in the hospital, forced to confront her own history, memory, dreams, and desires. Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including awkward third-person autobiographies. A graduate of University of Southern California (M.A.T. in Secondary English), Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A. in Fiction), and Columbia University (B.A. in English and Comparative Literature), she has worked as a high school English teacher and administrator, a textbook editor, and, during one nerve-wracking summer, a pharmacy technician. She currently writes and edits for the Spondylitis Association of America. She is the author of the Ann Petry Award-winning novel, Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024), as well as the essay/poetry chapbook, Self-Talk (Porkbelly Press, 2024) and you can find some of her recent work in Porter House Review, Cathexis Northwest press, Great River Review, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Esi lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and their two sons, who create stories, videos, and other artwork with enviable speed and imagination. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed. < Back American Ending Mary Kay Zuravleff December 19, 2023 It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed. The boys quit school to work in the mines along with the dads, and the Old Believers help each get through one challenge after another. When the mine explodes, it’s just another calamity in their lives. Yelena dreams of the fairy tales and fables she grew up hearing in this satisfying tale about family, community, and surviving as an immigrant in America. Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending (Blair, 2023), inspired by her Russian Orthodox Old Believer grandparents who lived in the coal-mining town of Marianna, PA. Her third novel Man Alive! was a Washington Post Notable Book, and she is the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and numerous DC Artist Fellowships. The Bowl Is Already Broken, her second novel, was described by the New York Times as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming.” In fact, Mary Kay worked for several Smithsonian museums for a dozen years, and she will go to any museum on any topic anywhere she happens to be. This has included the Acme Music Museum in Michigan, the Bee Museum in Quebec, and the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. < Back In Polite Company Gervais Hagerty July 18, 2021 Today I talked to Gervais Hagerty about her novel In Polite Company (William Morrow, 2021). Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. When Simons isn’t producing the news on a local TV station, she surfs the waves of Folly beach, crabs the salty rivers of Edisto Island, and joins an old friend at King Street bars. If she manages to accept the path laid out for her by generations, she’s also supposed marry her boyfriend, Trip. But she isn’t sure of anything. She confides her confusion only to her elegant grandmother, who urges her to be brave. Simons just has to figure out what that means. Author Gervais Hagerty grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Vanderbilt University. After a post-college stint in Southern California, she returned to the East Coast, where she worked as a news reporter and producer for both radio and television broadcasts. After earning her M.B.A. from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Hagerty was hired to teach Leadership Communications, and as director of the Patricia McArver Public Speaking Lab, she coached students, faculty, and staff to become effective speakers. She also advised the college's public speaking club. She is a board member of The Charleston Council for International Visitors and serves on Charleston's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. Gervais lives in Charleston with her husband and daughters, and when not writing, parenting, or trying to slow traffic so she can bike safely, she dabbles in creating single panel cartoons. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Today I talked to Benjamin Resnick about his novel Next Stop (Simon and Schuster, 2024) < Back Next Stop Benjamin Resnick November 12, 2024 A hole opens in the universe and suddenly consumes a building, then a neighborhood, and then the entire country of Israel. Conspiracies and antisemitic paranoia simmer, violence erupts, and life for Jews around the globe becomes even more hate filled. But Ethan and Ella, both Jewish, meet and fall in love in an unnamed American city. Their relationship has its challenges, including those involving Ella’s seven-year-old son, but their biggest struggle is trying to survive. Then thousands of airplanes disappear, borders close, and the world unravels more. Drones and robotic dogs patrol the streets and Jews are forced to live in a single neighborhood, slyly named after the historical Pale of Settlement. Some Jews escape to underground cities and others are join militias and resistance efforts, but Ella and Ethan are trying to find things to smile about in this thought-provoking, dystopian novel about cultural memory, societal crisis, and living in an upside-down world. Benjamin Resnick is a writer and the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center. Before joining the PJC in 2021, he served as Rav Beit HaSefer at Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago and as Rabbi and Education Director at Congregation Ahavas Achim in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Resinick majored in Literary Arts at Brown University in 006 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014. He has written nonfiction for multiple publications, including the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet, Modern Judaism and My Jewish Learning. Benjamin is married to journalist Philissa Cramer, who is currently editor-in-chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. They have two boys, Jonah and Gabriel. In his free time, he enjoys gardening, playing squash, and the Chicago Cubs. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. < Back Harvesting the Sky Karen Hugg September 7, 2021 Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. The fruit of the tree has mysterious medicinal properties, and Andre’s mission is both scientific and personal, because his mother has suffered a serious stroke. He receives sufficient funding to create the correct conditions to care for the trees, but he’s under pressure, both from his sponsors, and from a mysterious organization that fears the apple is an omen of evil. Second in Karen Hugg’s literary thriller series focused on the world of plants, Harvesting the Sky (Woodhall Press, 2021) is a parable about what we take from nature. Karen Hugg is also the author of The Forgetting Flower and Song of the Tree Hollow . Born into a Polish family and raised in Chicago, she later moved to Seattle and worked as an editor in tech, which gave her the opportunity to live in Paris for a short time. Afterward, she became a certified ornamental horticulturalist and master pruner. Karen earned an MFA from Goddard College and her work has appeared in The Big Thrill , Crime Reads , Thrive Global , and other publications. She lives with her husband and three kids in Seattle, where she’s finishing up her first nonfiction book, Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants . When she’s not writing or gardening, Karen is learning guitar by playing her favorite songs from the Scottish band, Travis. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Eliyah is 25 when she travels from Tel Aviv to Paris to meet up with her husband, who turns out to be having an affair with a French woman. As her life crumbles, Eliyah plunges into a deep depression, returns home to her childhood bed, and slowly descends into madness. < Back The Woman Beyond the Sea Sarit Yishai-Levi March 28, 2023 Eliyah is 25 when she travels from Tel Aviv to Paris to meet up with her husband, who turns out to be having an affair with a French woman. As her life crumbles, Eliyah plunges into a deep depression, returns home to her childhood bed, and slowly descends into madness. The therapist assigned to her after a suicide attempt manages to help her rebuild her life, but she still grapples with Lily, her not-very loving mother. Then Eliyah and her mother journey across the sea to discover the truth about who they both are. Moving but sometimes horrifying backstories set around the world fill out the lives of the characters - Eliyah’s mother, father, her new boyfriend, and her grandparents. This is a sweeping saga about trauma, betrayal, antisemitism, expulsion from home and country, and secrets. Sarit Yishai-Levi Yishai-Levi was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for eight generations. She’s been living with her family in Tel Aviv since 1970 and is a renowned Israeli journalist and author. In 2016 she published her first book, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem . It immediately became a bestseller and garnered critical acclaim. The book sold more than three hundred thousand copies in Israel, was translated into ten languages, and was adapted into a TV series that won the Israeli TV award for best drama series. It also won the Publishers Association’s Gold, Platinum, and Diamond prizes; the Steimatzky Prize for bestselling book of the year in Israel; and the WIZO France Prize for best book translated into French. Yishai-Levi’s second book, The Woman Beyond the Sea , was published in 2019. It won the Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum prizes and was adapted for television by Netflix. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next