Today we have the first chapter of Maria Finn’s new memoir, Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home. This selection is about Finn’s first tango lesson after her split from her cheating husband. She’s learning how to step and maintain her frame, but she’s also learning to be touched–not in a romantic way, but just one person to another. Though her heart is broken, there’s comfort in feeling her partner’s heartbeat and establishing a connection with another human.
Enjoy!
Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home
Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is featured this week on NPR’s What We’re Reading.
See, there’s this librarian. And a bird-watching boy. And a strange man with a harmonica and a roof-top pigeon keeper. There’s a glamorous aunt and her philanthropic boyfriend. There’s a desperate little family and a desperate little act. There’s also a survivor. Her name is Rachel. Rachel is growing up in the 1980s, haunted by her heritage (a black father and a Danish mother), as well as secrets she’s folded into her own history. The narrative weaves these lives and mysteries together effortlessly. Durrow tells this story in surround-sound, allowing the reader to step up and peek through the eyes of each character.
Shannon Rhoades, supervising senior editor at NPR’s “Morning Edition,” says:
“The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is the most recent recipient of the Bellwether Prize. Founded (and funded) by author Barbara Kingsolver, the award promotes ’socially responsible literature.’ While that sounds slightly medicinal, this book is anything but. Rachel’s voice resonated in my reading mind in much the same way as did that of the young protagonist of The House on Mango Street. There’s an achingly honest quality to it; both wise and naive, it makes you want to step between the pages to lend comfort.”
We’re so glad the good people at NPR love this book! We love it too! We’re so sure that you’re going to love it that we’d like to share a little sample with you. Don’t shove, there’s plenty for everyone.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
With almost the entire nation deep in this wintertime cold snap, today is the perfect on-sale date for the paperback edition of The New York Times bestseller A Reliable Wife, set in the bitter-cold winter of Wisconsin in 1909.
Borders recently interviewed debut author Robert Goolrick–you can watch the interview here, and read the first chapter below. We’re sure you’ll be hooked from the first page.
A Reliable Wife
So grab your warmest coat, hat, and gloves, brave the frigid wind, and head out to your nearest bookstore to pick up a copy! We’d love to hear what you think.
With New Year’s Eve right around the corner, we wanted to share a cocktail recipe from Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers. Following a celebratory evening and one too many glasses of champagne, what could be better than a New Year’s Day brunch, complete with a Bloody Mary–the traditional cure-all. Short-story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, was said to be a fan.
Believed to have been invented at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in the 1920s, the Bloody Mary came over to the States after Prohibition via bartender Fernand “Pete” Petoit. Pete made the drink with gin and served it under the name Red Snapper. The perfect eye-opener, it is favored by those, like Carver, who know from a hangover.
2 oz. vodka
½ oz. lemon juice
¼ oz. Worcestershire sauce
3 dashes Tabasco sauce
¼ tsp. grated horseradish
1 pinch cracked pepper
1 pinch salt
1 pinch celery salt
Top with tomato juice
Celery stalk
Lime wedge
Pour all ingredients (except garnish and tomato juice) into a highball glass. Fill with ice cubes. Top with tomato juice, and stir. Garnish with celery stalk and lime wedge. Feel free to adjust ingredients to taste, but remember—the horseradish is essential. Enjoy!
-Katie
My mother’s mother followed the German tradition of not decorating until Christmas Eve. My other grandmother, my parents, and everyone else in town were finished weeks in advance, but Annie would never budge. The tree would be closed up behind the sliding doors of the “big living room,” which I now remember as being as big as a ballroom. Early in the evening the doors were thrown open, revealing the fait accompli. There were wonderful old Victorian and German ornaments, as well as strings of those lights that look like candles with boiling colored liquid inside.
When we were very little, we would be taken there for the great unveiling, given supper, and put to bed upstairs, because many of the adults would be going to midnight Mass and all of them would be coming back later for supper. For a small Southern town New Bern had a large Roman Catholic congregation. We were seen as an exotic bunch, there were Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who came to live in eastern North Carolina in the thirties as well as Yankees who often came to us by way of nearby military bases. It was at church that I first met Italians and Poles.
A midnight church service was considered sophisticated and elegant. People who didn’t see eye to eye with the faith were nonetheless pleased to be invited to this service. I remember that my great-grandmother was somewhat put out when the Episcopalians took up the custom, stealing some thunder.
In those days, church law required fasting in advance of Holy Communion, so by the time church was over at 1 a.m., everyone was starving. There was always a houseful, even though everyone had Santa Claus to see to and would probably be getting up very early.
The buffet was limited and heavy on sweets. Remarkably for that hour, coffee was always served. The crowd was festive, noisy, and very dressed up. Protestant friends stopped by as well and we wondered what they had done to pass the time until church was over.
Later we would be taken home, half asleep in our parents’ arms, and put into our own beds. This is one of my pleasantest childhood memories.
With the exception of the baked ham, these recipes were all gleaned from my grandmother Shields’s handwritten book. Instructions were sparse, ingredients have changed, candy making is considered arcane now, and beaten biscuits are almost unheard of. Many other recipes have been lost. Grandmother’s rum ball recipe has disappeared, and while everyone remembers that Anne Lucas had a recipe for sweet cheese biscuits, we can’t find that either.
All of the above proved to be a particular challenge for my friend and recipe tester, Sheri Castle. I gave her all these right before I disappeared into the snows of Quebec this winter. Her e-mails were hilarious. After a third try at the fudge, she resorted to drink. However, now they are all deciphered for the modern kitchen and they all work. Candy making is precise, so follow the instructions carefully, but don’t be afraid.
Baked Ham for a Big Brunch
Beaten Biscuits
Cheese Biscuits
Fudge
Date Nut Roll
Candied Citrus Peels
Dark Fruitcake
Egg Nog
Coffee
For these recipes and more, check out Bill Smith’s Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook’s Corner and from Home.
In honor of the fifth day of Chanukah today, it seemed appropriate to share an essay from How to Spell Chanukah . . . and Other Holiday Dilemmas. Edited by Emily Franklin, the book features 18 writers reflecting on the Festival of Lights. Including essays from Steve Almond, Jonathan Tropper, Edward Schwarzchild and Joshua Braff.
Joshua Braff celebrates the holiday in his essay “The Blue Team.”
“What a holiday! No pestilence, no slavery, no locusts, no cattle disease or atonement. No synagogue, no guilt, no mortar, and no real lesson to be absorbed and passed down to my Jewish offspring. Thank God.”
Read the full piece below.
-KatieHow to Spell Chanukah Excerpt
Flash fiction is a difficult form to pull off, and many times stories in that form can feel more like scenes rather than turning points or moments of recognition. And speaking of difficult forms, stories written from the perspective of second person can seem stagey, or worse, presumptuous. But good writers are always able to defy the rules that you thought had to be followed.
In “Some Thing Blue,” Tayari Jones writes a flash fiction story in second person that is unbelievably moving and full. I’m convinced that were it written in any other form, it wouldn’t have the same power of capturing this moment and making it fully resonate. How she accomplishes this in just eight short paragraphs is something of a miracle. -Kathy
Kathy Pories is Senior Editor at Algonquin and Editor of our annual New Stories from the South series.
In Scottsboro, Alabama, there is a warehouse store that sells everything that people leave behind on airplanes. This is where your mother has found your wedding dress.
You are apprehensive. What ever happened to “something old, something new?” What you have so far is something mortgaged—this would be your childhood home. (Storybook weddings are far more costly than anyone imagined.) There is also something pawned—your engagement ring, one and one third carats, clear as drinking water. (Your fiancé Marcus, being both book-smart and streetwise, haggled with the pawn broker for almost an hour.) And now, there is this lovely gown—something ditched. Because let’s face it. No one just loses a dress like this. (The designer is famous and photogenic; her picture is printed in gossip magazines.)
But how can you complain? Marcus is a good guy. He is a podiatrist. More importantly, your mother is happy and she is alive. Only two years ago, she lay bald and dying, weeping because she would never be a grandmother, never wear the mother-of-the-bride dress she bought six years ago on sale at Filene’s.
With the holiday season upon us, it’s the perfect time to pick up Suzanne Berne’s novel, The Ghost at the Table, set at a family Thanksgiving in New England. In the Washington Post, Ron Charles called it “A witty, moving and psychologically astute story about siblings and the disparate ways they remember common experiences from childhood.”
This story of two sisters who remain “devoted”–as long as they stay on opposite coasts–is the perfect read on the plane ride to visit distant relatives, or to curl up with in a post-Turkey stupor on your parent’s couch. Read the first chapter here.
Excerpt from The Ghost at the Table
-Katie
There is a lot of buzz surrounding Lauren Grodstein’s new novel, A Friend of the Family, which just released last week. This story of a suburban father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself, has been receiving rave reviews. Sara Nelson picked it as one of the “15 Hottest Books of the Fall” in The Daily Beast. The Washington Post raved, “Horrifyingly plausible and deeply poignant, A Friend of the Family will leave you shaken and chastened—and grateful for the warning.” And People magazine chimed in, “Grodstein’s harsh, honest prose makes this haunting tale worthwhile.”
Read the first chapter here!
A Friend of the Family
Though many books have been written about Orson Welles, exploring his success as an actor and producer and his faults as a person, none have given a more intimate reflection than In My Father’s Shadow — a memoir by Chris Welles Feder, Orson’s eldest daughter. The book offers an enchanting and mesmerizing look at a man who was a mystery to many, but also a stranger to his family.
The media is already heating up. An Associated Press feature hit the wire just this week; click here to read it in the San Francisco Chronicle. Other forthcoming media includes NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and Bob Edwards Weekend, Vanity Fair, More magazine, and Turner Classic Movie’s “Movie Reel” TV promos throughout November.
The book–which includes more than 50 never-before-seen photographs–is available in stores now. We’re including an excerpt and a few pics to whet your appetite. Come back tomorrow for a very special guest post from the author!
-christina
October 10, 1985. Orson Welles was found slumped over his typewriter. Sometime during the night, his heart had stopped. He had died not in Las Vegas, where he maintained a home for the third Mrs. Orson Welles, but in Los Angeles, where he had been living openly with his Croatian companion, Oja Kodar.
All that day, after I heard the news, nothing seemed real to me. I felt light-headed, as though I had walked into a soap bubble. How could my father have died when he was only seventy years old? It was true he had not been well for some time, but I had never expected to lose him so young, so soon. So suddenly.
Nor could I believe my father was dead when I had only to turn on the television and there he was, vibrantly alive. All day I sat in a daze of disbelief, watching the networks resurrect him. There was the middle-aged Orson Welles whose button nose twitched and whose great belly shook when he let loose with a thunderous laugh on the Merv Griffin Show. In another clip, he had changed from an amiable Santa Claus into a tall, flamboyant youth who looked vaguely like Oscar Wilde, a lock of dark hair falling in his eyes. It was unnerving to see him at every age in his masks and disguises, these versions of Orson Welles for public consumption, so different from the father I had known. Only the deep, resonant voice was unmistakably his. It was the voice of melting chocolate, rich and velvety, the voice that promised to always love his “darling girl.”
It was late at night when I finally turned off the television. For hours I lay beside my gently snoring husband, my mind shut down, my heart closed, everything in me still refusing to measure my loss. At last I fell into a fitful sleep. Then something woke me in the pitch black room, my heart pounding. The illuminated hands of the bedside clock pointed to four in the morning.
It was the hour when nothing moved and New York City slept. I listened for the faint rumble of a car, but even the lone drunk who usually ranted up and down Fifth Avenue had been swallowed up in the silence. Soon it would be first light, and I shivered, for suddenly I knew I had been shielding myself all day, but I no longer could. The soap bubble burst, and I began to cry.
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