Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex is a book lover’s dream: Not only is it a book about a book, it’s a page-turning thriller. History dishes up some pretty compelling tales, and Friedman uncovered a spellbinder. “I expected to write a heartening story about the rescue of this book,” Friedman writes, “but instead found myself like a person who innocently opens a cupboard and finds himself buried under a pile of forgotten things.”

It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book.

About the book

This true-life detective story unveils the journey of a sacred text—the tenth-century annotated bible known as the Aleppo Codex—from its hiding place in a Syrian synagogue to the newly founded state of Israel. Based on Friedman’s independent research, documents kept secret for fifty years, and personal interviews with key players, the book proposes a new theory of what happened when the codex left Aleppo, Syria, in the late 1940s and eventually surfaced in Jerusalem, mysteriously incomplete.

Known as the Crown, the codex provides vital keys to reading biblical texts. By recounting its history, Friedman explores the once vibrant Jewish communities in Islamic lands and follows the thread into the present, uncovering difficult truths about how the manuscript was taken to Israel and how its most important pages went missing. Along the way, he raises critical questions about who owns historical treasures and the role of myth and legend in the creation of a nation.

Click here to listen to Matti Friedman’s podcast on Tablet.

Praise for Matti Friedman’s The Aleppo Codex

“The Aleppo Codex could be read as a thriller. It could also be read as a history of the Jewish people, or as a meditation on history and myth. This great book comes closer to containing everything than any book I’ve read in a long, long time.”—Jonathan Safran Foer

“[Friedman] opened a treasure box of history, mystery, conspiracy, and convolutions that would do any biblical thriller proud . . . Friedman has done a remarkable job—finding sources and digging through archives—of getting the Crown’s fascinating story out of the shadows and into the light. In the process, he’s become the latest in the long line of the Crown’s protectors.”—Booklist, starred review

“Friedman gives a masterful account of a major religious document . . . [he] delivers an atmospheric, tense story about the destruction of a sacred relic, raising inevitable questions about who owns a people’s historical treasures.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sharply etched . . . A carefully paced narrative of purloined Judaica.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Friedman’s account of how the Codex was taken from Syria in the 1940s, later to resurface in Jerusalem, although no longer complete, is full of betrayals, controversy and surprises — and raises larger questions about the ownership and preservation of historical treasures.” —Jewish Week

“The Aleppo Codex builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller.” – Salon

“Thrilling . . . a real-life National Treasure that reads like fantastical fiction.”—CultureMob

“Matti Friedman is a stunningly talented writer, a once-in-a-generation discovery. The Aleppo Codex has enough betrayals, conspiracies, surprise plot twists, sacred flimflam men, and well-dressed contraband dealers for the best of thrillers — but every bit of it is meticulously researched fact. Cancel your appointments, bury your cell phone — you won’t want to be interrupted – and read this book.”—Gershom Gorenberg, Senior Correspondent for The American Prospect and author of The Accidental Empire

“A beautifully woven tale of epic proportions about a sacred book and its all-too-human custodians. I did not put it down until I had finished it at the crack of dawn. Absolutely riveting!”—Oren Harman, author of The Price of Altruism

Read an excerpt from The Aleppo Codex

Our Southern Roots

While the geographic scope of Algonquin has certainly expanded in the last thirty years, we take great pride in the Southern literary talent that became the cornerstone of our house. From May 14 to May 27, you can purchase seven Algonquin classics for only $1.99 each. So stir up a pitcher of mint julep, settle into that porch swing, and enjoy our Southern storytellers.

Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.” So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kay Gibbons’ unforgettable debut novel, one that received high praise from both Eudora Welty and Walker Percy.

Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy

In a corner of the rural South blistering with hatred and petty meanness, Nathan and Roy must hide their love for each other from friends, church, and family. But that comes easily to Nathan, who is used to keeping secrets. A stunningly brave work of first love—between two adolescent boys who sustain each other in a world of domestic disintegration.

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp

Everything happens the summers Sugar Mecklin turns ten, eleven, and twelve, around the same time his father tells him that “the Delta is filled up with death.” And death does turn up all over the place, but Sugar is an optimist, and magic might prove once and for all to be real. This dark, hilarious, and affecting work is proof that Nordan is one of the South’s very finest writers.

Dori Sander’s Clover

Clover is a ten-year old black girl from a small town in South Carolina whose life changes forever when her father dies and she is forced to forge a new relationship with the white stepmother she hardly knows. A beautiful, trenchant story of family lost and found, Clover is a unique and heartfelt reading experience for all ages.

Jill McCorkle’s The Cheer Leader

Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it—straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early seventies, her carefully normal life explodes, and she comes completely undone.

Lary Brown’s Joe

Nearing fifty, Joe Ransom won’t slow down, not in his pickup, not with a gun and certainly not with women. But all the fast living in Mississippi won’t quell the hunger Joe can’t name. At fifteen, Gary Jones is already slipping through the cracks. Part of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, he’s desperate for a way out. He finds it in Joe. Together they’ll follow a twisting map to redemption—or ruin.

Clyde Edgerton’s Raney

The story of the first two years, two months, and two days of a modern southern marriage. Raney is a Free Will Baptist. Charles is an Episcopalian. Raney’s views—on sex, race relations, child rearing—are, um, conservative. Charles’s are a little more liberal. Can this marriage be saved?

Here at Algonquin we never get bored of giving books as gifts. I like to think that those of us who have grown to be such devoted book lovers inherited this passion from our parents. For Mother’s Day this year, I urge all of you to run to your local bookstore and pick up at least 2 copies of Katie Workman’s THE MOM 100 COOKBOOK. You need to get one for your mom, but you also need one for yourself, and maybe even another for any new moms that you might know!

The recipes are perfect for weeknights, without relying on processed ingredients or short cuts that take away from the overall flavor of the dish, and filled with clever work-arounds to please everyone in the family. Making Mom breakfast in bed? I highly recommend the pancakes!

The only gift that I love to give more than a book is something handmade. This year, I have my eye on these adorable e-reader covers, made out of deconstructed old books. Check out this great tutorial from Instructables! Books and something handmade together? Nothing would make me happier.

If you’re the sort that can’t stomach tearing apart a hardcover to make an e-reader case, or perhaps don’t believe me when I promise you that if you start right now you can definitely knit your mother a pair of fingerless gloves in time for brunch on Sunday, then you can’t go wrong with an Algonquin paperback. Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow is just out in paperback this week. As Essence magazine said “If your mom is a fan of emotionally charged morality tales (and whose mom isn’t?), she’s going to devour Tayari Jones’s third novel, Silver Sparrow in a single sitting.”

For new moms, nothing could be more perfect than Mei-Ling Hopgood’s How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm, And Other Adventures in Parenting, which Booklist named “A Best Bet for New Parents”. When Mei-Ling Hopgood had her first child, she embarked on a journey to learn how other cultures approach the challenges all parents face: bedtimes, potty training, feeding, playtimes, and more. It’s an exciting and interesting read, and you’ll love reading how Hopgood tested her discoveries on her toddler, Sofia, with some enlightening results. Check out the Algonquin Book Club Catalog for more great book club picks to find something that your mom is sure to love!

Enjoy, and Happy Mother’s Day!

Applying the Nature Principle: 20 Ways to Create a Restorative Home and Garden

Want to improve your family’s mental and physical health, and increase their creativity and learning abilities? Start at home. Whether you’re building a new house or retrofitting your existing home and garden, here are a few tips for applying the Nature Principle:

Indoors 

1. Bring the outside in. Create “living walls” of ficus, hibiscus, orchids, and other plants; or an indoor vertical vegetable garden with a drip-irrigation system. Such walls can reduce indoor air pollutants.

2. Record nature sounds and fill your house with them.

3. Use nature-based furniture and decorations such as a dresser made of reclaimed wood, or floors or rugs made of sustainable bamboo or bamboo fabric.

4. Use trees, live or dead, as decoration in high-ceilinged living rooms.

5. Use lights that adjust throughout the day via sensors at the windows.

6. Combine solar panels with skylights. Install them over water gardens and other living features.

7. To protect wildlife, add bird-warning elements to windows.

Outdoors

8. With your family, plant an organic vegetable garden and include fruit trees.

9. Install a beehive, or raise chickens or ducks for eggs. Some cities are loosening regulations to encourage yard farming.

10. Create nature-rich calming places to sit, read, think and converse.

11. Reduce your lawn. Replace it with bird-attracting plants, trees and bushes. (Lawns are now the largest irrigated crop in the United States.)

12. Plant a butterfly garden; help bring back butterfly migration routes.

13. Space-restricted urbanites can use dwarf tree varieties and mini-gardens to transform small balconies and windowsills.

14. Install a chlorine-free natural swimming pond cleaned by regeneration zones: aquatic plants, rocks, loose gravel, and friendly bacteria that act as water filters.

When building a new home

15. Design natural landscapes to look good from the curb and also from inside the home.

16. Place the house in sync with the sun’s movements, so that sleeping and waking are in accord with available light; place large windows on the south-facing wall for passive solar heating, but also for a view of nature.

17. Design for natural airflow with appropriately placed windows and high ceiling fans for natural ventilation.

18. If site and regulations allow, build your home with cordwood masonry (lumber set in earthen mortar), cement mixed with recycled-paper pulp, aerated concrete or straw-bale walls. Homes built with these materials can be so energy efficient that they need no air-conditioning – and you’ll receive the health benefits of fresh air.

19. Install a super-insulated green roof that can last 80 years (compared with the 40-year average for conventional roofs) and at the same time create wildlife habitat – which may improve your mental health.

20. Whenever possible, use local materials to reflect the natural history of the region. Sustainability aside, this may deepen your sense of regional and personal identity.

Richard Louv is the author of “THE NATURE PRINCIPLE: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age,” now available in paperback. He is Chairman Emeritus of The Children and Nature Network and 2012 spokesperson for the CLIF Kid Backyard Game of the Year. For more information on his books, go to www.richardlouv.com. For a free online Field Guide to the New Nature Movement, see http://richardlouv.com/books/nature-principle/field-guide/.

O Magazine’s

Slate’s Best Books of 2011 list

Library Journal’s Top Ten Best Books of 2011 list

Atlanta Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 list

June 2011 Indie Next Pick

National Women’s Book Association Great Group Read for 2011

As you pack your beach towels and sunscreen and prepare your summer reading list, don’t forget to snag a copy of Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow for your vacation getaway. It offers the thrills and drama you look for in a good summer book, fueled by a family’s secrets and dysfunctional relationships, but at the same time Jones goes beyond the standard summer reading fare with prose that is incredibly intimate and poignant.

About the book

With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives.

At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.

Praise for Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow:

“In Silver Sparrow—an amazing novel about a man with two families, one hidden and one public—Jones does something breathtaking and difficult: She renders a unique family dynamic with such precision and sensitivity that it becomes universal. It is amazing to watch, time and time again in this book, how Jones reveals the ways in which family both creates and destroys our identity. Jones’ previous novels are fantastic, but this book feels like a masterpiece.” – Kevin Wilson in Salon.com feature on writers’ favorite books of 2011

“It’s an amazing, amazing read.”—Jennifer Weiner on NBC’s “The Today Show”

“A soaring, uplifting take on secret sisters from up-and-comer Tayari Jones.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

“This is a complicated, heartbreaking and very rich story about how secret sisters find each other but lose as much as they gain in the process.” – Michele Norris on NPR’s “All Things Considered”

“Tayari Jones has taken Atlantafor her literary terroir, and like many of our finest novelists, she gives readers a sense of place in a deeply observed way. But more than that, Jones has created in her main characters tour guides of that region: honest, hurt, observant and compelling young women whose voices cannot be ignored… Impossible to put down until you find out how these sisters will discover their own versions of family.”—Los Angeles Times

“Award winner Tayari Jones weaves a tale of Black bigamy and two families in the fascinating fiction of Silver Sparrow.”—Ebony

“Populating this absorbing novel is a vivid cast of characters, each with his own story… Jones writes dialogue that is realistic and sparkling, with an intuitive sense of how much to reveal and when. Occasionally, she inserts a spot-on Southern bon mot that might have been handed down from one generation to another: ‘With wives, it only matters who gets there first. . . . Wives can afford to let themselves go. Concubines must be vigilant.’”—Washington Post

“Tayari Jones’s immensely pleasurable new novel pulls off a minor miracle… Subtly exploring the power of labels… Jones crafts an affecting tale about things, big and small, we forfeit to forge a family. There are no winners in this empathetic and provocative story, only survivors.”—MORE

“Charting a vast emotional unknown is Tayari Jones’s compelling third novel, Silver Sparrow, in which a teenage girl’s coming of age in 1980s Atlanta is shadowed by her dawning understanding of a corrosive secret – her father’s second family.” – Vogue

“Tayari Jones is fast defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester…” —The Village Voice

Read an excerpt from Silver Sparrow

Name:

Bookstore: The Book Table

Title: Co-owner

Brief Bio: Jason began selling books in 1991, moving from one Chicago independent bookstore to another. In 2003, he and his wife, Rachel Weaver, opened The Book Table in Downtown Oak Park, IL.

What books recently rocked my world: Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, Ted Heller’s Pocket Kings and Adam Levin’s Hot Pink. 

Best damn event(s) we’ve hosted: We had Chris Ware and Charles Burns together for an evening at Frank Lloyd Wright’s modern masterpiece, Unity Temple. Whenever you can bring two icons together for an evening with several hundred dedicated fans, you know you’re doing something right.

Most entertaining author(s) we’ve hosted: I once sold books at a benefit for The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights where the featured speaker was Luis Urrea. Like a lot of benefits, there were lots of other speakers and right before Urrea went on there was the cutest performance by the Pilsen/Little Village Children’s Choir. They could not have been more adorable and I’d never seen Urrea speak, so I was terrified that there was no way that he could possibly follow them. As he was being introduced, he walked by my table, looked at me and said, “All right, let’s sell some books.” Then he took the stage and just killed/maimed/destroyed. He did a talk that had people laughing so hard they were falling out of their chairs and then right after that he had people crying from heartbreaking stories.

Strangest question a customer has ever asked: Well, just a week ago a customer said, “I already have books on Norway, do you have any books on the country of Norwegian?”

Why our store kicks ass: Because every day our store shows that indies can indeed compete on price. Because when we opened our store a block and a half away from a chain store, everybody told us we were crazy, but we’re still here and they’re not. Because words like “community” and phrases like “a sense of place” may have turned into Madison Avenue buzz words, but we prove every day that they can indeed be real.

What makes our neighborhood and customers awesome: Take a very urban suburb, add the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, drop in Frank Lloyd Wright’s first prairie style home and studio and add another 24 Wright homes for good measure, populate the Village with a (mostly) progressive citizenry known for promoting racial diversity in the 60′s and GLBQT issues for decades and you get a community that has embraced us since day one and uses our store to discuss and debate (often loudly and with wild gesticulations) literature, art, film and politics as much as my wife and I do.

I promise you won’t find this at any other store: We have a photograph of Henry Tabor that looks over our art section. Henry was a giant in the industry. He worked for Kroch’s and Brentano’s for 40 years and ran their art department at their flagship Downtown store until he was forced out in 1993 (one of the many disastrous moves in the chain’s final years that culminated in their bankruptcy in 1995). You can watch older Chicagoans do a double take all the time when they see the photograph and it often leads to the sharing of great stories about the history of bookselling in Chicago.

Why I do what I do: I don’t even understand the question. What else could I possibly be qualified to do?

If I weren’t selling books I’d be: Giving them away for free because the only two events that would end my career would be either winning the lottery or after the Revolution when the Council of People’s Commissars hopefully still lets me hang out around books.

Books that changed my life: Malcolm Bradbury’s My Strange Quest for Mensonge for showing me that sometimes fiction is the best medium for explaining complicated subjects and The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barkworth (a pseudonym for Arthur Freeman) which is the greatest bibliomystery ever written and showed me that just because I was a bookseller didn’t mean that I needed to give up a life of solving crime.

Top three authors, living or dead, I’d invite to my dinner party: Emma Goldman and Leon Trotsky with Ayn Rand in the middle to be used as a metaphorical (or literal) punching bag

Top three songs on the soundtrack to my life: “My Favorite Mutiny” by the Coup, “Old Chunk of Coal” by Billy Joel Shaver, but sung by Johnny Cash, and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs

My last meal request: Whatever would be the most fun for medical students to find when they dissect my body.

Check out more of the great reviews below, as well as a first chapter excerpt.

About the book

Before she met Il-sun in an orphanage, Gi was a hollow husk of a girl, broken from growing up in one of North Korea’s forced-labor camps. A mathematical genius, she has learned to cope with pain by retreating into a realm of numbers and calculations, an escape from both the past and present. Gi becomes enamored of the brash and radiant Il-sun, a friend she describes as “all woman and springtime.” But Il-sun’s pursuit of a better life imperils both girls when her suitor spirits them across the Demilitarized Zone and sells them as sex workers, first in South Korea and then in the United States.

For Gi and Il-sun, forced into the underworld of human trafficking, their captivity outside North Korea is far crueler than the tight control of their “Dear Leader.” Tenderhearted Gi, just on the verge of womanhood, is consigned to a fate that threatens not only her body but her mind. How she and Il-sun endure, how they find a path to healing, is what drives this absorbing and exquisite novel—from an exciting young Algonquin discovery—to its perfectly imagined conclusion.

Praise for All Woman and Springtime

“[A] terrifying and masterfully realized debut . . . One of its most impressive achievements is the rendering of main character Gi, who is brought powerfully and beautifully to life . . . Jones depicts both the innocence of his protagonist and the pathologies and violence of the South Korean underworld with great skill and emotional power. VERDICT Impossible to put down, this work is important reading for anyone who cares about the power of literature to engage the world and speak its often frightening truths.” —Library Journal

“A compelling psychological tour of life inside the socially and politically restrictive borders of North Korea via the poignant stories of two young girls on the cusp of womanhood . . . This tale of female friendship is distinguished by its illuminating glimpse into the arcane intricacies of both an ancient and a modern culture. Guaranteed to appeal to fans of Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) and the novels of Lisa See.”—Booklist

“Dramatic . . . [A] well-paced story.”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the most absorbing, chilling, beautifully written, and important novels I’ve read in many years.”
—Alice Walker

“All Woman and Springtime is a lovely novel brimming with heartache and hope in equal measure. Jones has a gift for empathy as well as a keen sense of justice. This book will open your eyes, break your heart, and then mend it again.” —Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow

Applying the Nature Principle to Your Life Nature-Smart Jobs for the Future (and Right Now), Part II

Want to make a decent living and a better life? Here’s one way. Get a job – a nature-smart job. Or better yet, be a nature-smart entrepreneur. By that, I don’t mean a career devoted only to energy efficiency. That’s important, but there’s a whole new category of green jobs coming. These careers and avocations will help children and adults become happier, healthier, and smarter, by truly greening where people live, work, learn, and play. Here are a few examples.

• New agrarians. Who are they? Urban farmers who design and operate community gardens. Designers and operators of vertical farms in high-rise buildings. Organic farmers and innovative vanguard ranchers who use sophisticated organic practices to produce food. The focus is on local, family-scale sustainable food, fiber, and fuel production in, near, and beyond cities.

• Natural health service. Ecopsychologists—Wilderness therapy professionals—are going mainstream. Some pediatricians are now prescribing or recommending “green exercise” in parks and other natural settings for their young patients and their families. Hospitals, mental health centers, and nursing home are creating healing gardens. The Portland, Oregon, parks department partners with physicians who send families to local parks, where park rangers serve as health para profesionals. In the U.K., a growing “green care” movement encourages therapeutic horticulture, ecotherapy, and green-care farming.

• Green exercise trainers. Exercising indoors and outdoors seems to produce different results. Even when the same number of calories are burned. Outside exercise appears to have better results, especially for psychological well-being. Green exercise trainers can help individuals and families individually or by organizing “green gyms” and family nature clubs. “People walkers” can help the elderly take a hike.

• Natural teachers. As parents and educators learn more about the brain-stimulating power of learning in natural settings, demand will increase for nature-based schools and nature-based experiential learning, providing new opportunities for natural teachers and natural-playscape and school-garden designers.

• Bioregional guides. We’ll see the emergence of citizen naturalists who, as professionals or volunteers, help people get to know where they live. One organization, Exploring a Sense of Place, in the San Francisco Bay Area, guides groups that want to have a deeper understanding of the life surrounding them. Think of these guides as nature-smart welcome wagons that help us develop a deeper sense of personal and local identity.

The list of possible careers can go on. Stream restorers, law-enforcement officials who use nature for crime prevention and improved prison recidivism, specialists in nature-based geriatric services. Once the entrepreneurial spirit kicks in, it’s easy to start thinking of products and services. And when people begin to consider the career possibilities of human restoration through nature, their eyes light up: here is a positive, hopeful view of the human relationship with the Earth, a way to make a living and a life.

Richard Louv is the author of “THE NATURE PRINCIPLE: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age,” now available in paperback, from which this piece is adapted. He is Chairman Emeritus of The Children and Nature Network and 2012 spokesperson for the CLIF Kid Backyard Game of the Year. For more information on his books, go to http://www.richardlouv.com. For a free online Field Guide to the New Nature Movement, see http://richardlouv.com/books/nature-principle/field-guide/.

“Of course, Sam was right. No one heard you when you said you were sick of Paris. ‘Sick of Paris’ meant your mind was rotten. You

I was nineteen when I officially began my study-abroad program in Paris. Armed with a battered copy of my French-English dictionary, two oversized suitcases stuffed to the brim with impractical items such as flip-flops and my beloved case of “Felicity” DVDs, I moved in with my charming host mother Isabelle, and her kleptomaniac daughter Alix. Their apartment was located far from the center of town–all the way in the now fashionable twentieth arrondisement–nearly a forty-minute metro ride from my classes at the Sorbonne.

I have always loved Paris. Paris, the city of light, the city of love! I knew (and my parents, bless them, were on board as well) that I would somehow make it so that I could live in that city one day. However, what I didn’t expect was the frustration and loneliness that accompanied me during my year-long stay. There were several factors to this mix: I was away from home, away from my on-again, off-again boyfriend (although we never did define those terms, which, in retrospect, I realized only added to my constant frustration). I didn’t know how cold the weather could be; I certainly didn’t know it was possible to get sick of croissants.

Which is why Rosecrans Baldwin’s travel memoir PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN is one of the better written, more honest, more beautiful books about living in a foreign city that I have ever read. Not only is Rosecrans hilarious (I dare you to read this and attempt not to burst out laughing), his prose is elegant and infectious (Men had draped the trees on the Champs-Elysees with twinkling purple lights that blinked in sequence. Like two rows of neon saline drips, as if the avenue were a hospital ward). Those lines simply kill me. His book follows his adventures in advertising (particularly, the huge campaign for Louis Vuitton that features celebrities such as Sofia Coppola and Sir Sean Connery) as Rosecrans and his wife Rachel settle in Paris. From the insane amount of medical tests you must obtain in order to get your carte de sejour, to the panic one feels in making a telephone call in another language to the French’s obsession with McDonalds, Rosecrans brilliantly covers the difficulties anyone can face when uprooted to unfamiliar territory.

I ended up moving out of the host family’s apartment (once my jackets went ‘missing’, I knew it was time to leave) and into a shared studio with one of my closest friends Emily, deep in the center of the Marais. We shake our heads now over our struggles with adapting to a new country: learning how to date in a foreign language, the easiest method to establish a French bank account and all those hours spent avoiding going outside to stay in (cue hand slap to forehead) in order to watch Felicity flirt with Ben behind the counter at Dean & Deluca. To hear such a seasoned writer tell us that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed in a new country, and that homesickness is just as common as a winter flu, made me feel less shamed of those hours spent in front of the laptop screen and more appreciative of the magic that is Paris.

*North Carolinians! Rosecrans Baldwin will be reading at FLYLEAF BOOKS in Chapel Hill TONIGHT, Tuesday May 1^st, at 7:00pm. 

Do you have a favorite poem that isn’t listed? Tell us about it and link to it in the comments for a chance to win a copy of Julia Alvarez’s poetry collection The Woman I Kept to Myself. Please also check out Alvarez’s beautiful memoir A Wedding in Haiti, which just came out last week.

Lauren’s Picks:

“Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson

“Needs” by Stuart Dischell

“fire” by Nick Flynn

“Chosen by the Lion” by Linda Gregg

“A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass

“Piss Christ” by Andrew Hudgins

“Nude Interrogation” by Yusef Komunyakaa

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” by Larry Levis

“Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Old Joke” by Alan Shapiro

“Duende” by Tracy K. Smith

“Door in the Mountain” by Jean Valentine

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright

“Adam’s Curse” by W. B. Yeats

Megan’s Picks:

“The Distances” by Jim Carroll

“love is more thicker than forget” by e. e. cummings

“All This and More” by Mary Karr

“A Fable” by Robert Kelly

“Happiness” by Jane Kenyon

“Food of Love” by Carolyn Kizer

“Love Song”by Carol Muske-Dukes

“One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII” by Pablo Neruda

“Steps” by Frank O’Hara

“Know-Nothing” by Sharon Olds

“Beggar’s Song” by Gregory Orr

“Love Song” by Dorothy Parker

“Thin” by Kay Ryan

“All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton

“Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand