Women's Books

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

Everyone in the broken-down town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, has a story too worn to repeat—from the girls who play the pass-out game just to feel like they’re somewhere else, to the packs of aimless teenage boys, to the old women from far away who left everything behind. But there’s one story they all still tell: the oldest and saddest but most hopeful story, the one about the girl who will be able to take their twisted world and straighten it out. The girl who will bring the magic.

Could Sophie Swankowski be that girl? With her tangled hair and grubby clothes, her weird habits and her visions of a filthy, swearing mermaid who comes to her when she’s unconscious, Sophie could be the one to uncover the power flowing beneath Chelsea’s potholed streets and sludge-filled rivers, and the one to fight the evil that flows there, too. Sophie might discover her destiny, and maybe even in time to save them all.

And here is your go-to interview with Michelle Tea for all the mermaid-specific decisions in the book.

Praise for Mermaid in Chelsea Creek:

“I couldn’t keep still when I was reading Mermaid in Chelsea Creek. I kept standing up to pace around because I was so excited by the book and then I’d hurry back to my chair so I hadn’t missed anything. The novel has everything terrific about Michelle Tea, with the grit and the wit and the girls in trouble loving each other fierce and true, and then it has all the juice of a terrific fantasy novel, with the magic and the creatures and the otherworldly sense of something lurking underneath each artifact of our ordinary lives. I can’t keep still to write a blurb about it. Just read the thing, read it now.”
—Daniel Handler

“A radiant hybrid of piercing realism, creeping horror, and heartbreaking fantasy—but fantasy with dirt in its hair and scabs on its knees. Tea is an uncommon talent doing uncommon things and her voice tickles you, slaps you, whatever it takes to wake your ass up.”
—Daniel Kraus, author of Rotters

“Tea’s novel is a refreshing breath of air in the world of YA, equal parts eerie, heartbreaking, and fantastical.”
—ZYZZYVA

“Each line carries substantive heft, emblematic of extensive research on Polish mythology, grounded by the gritty, immigrant haven that is Chelsea, Massachusetts.”
—SF Weekly

“The story itself braids threads of ancient myths and lore with today’s world full of mixed emotions and environmental neglect. It blurs the line between fact and fiction gracefully, thereby making the impossible seem possible.”
—Insatiable Readers

”Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is a triumph in its own right, a stand-alone treat.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Tea populated her foray into the genre with head-nods to outsider fantasy, Here, pigeons aren’t marginalized—they’re bearers of wisdom; and mermaids are surly and complex, not preening or diabolical.”
—Buzzfeed

“I started reading Michelle Tea’s Mermaid in Chelsea Creek on the subway this morning and was instantly hooked… can’t wait to get back to it”
—Emily Temple, Flavorwire

“If you want to read a really original book with gutsy characters, I strongly, sweary recommend you find this book.”
—Sparknotes

“There’s a lot of heavy wisdom in this book, alongside the beauty and the grunge…And there’s a lot of humor too—it wouldn’t be Michelle Tea if you didn’t laugh out loud at her spot-on cultural observations, her astute sarcasm at the banalities that infiltrate our gorgeous world.”
—Lamda Literary

“A fun read… a classic fairytale.”
—San Francisco Book Review

“It’s as if Chelsea is Narnia, with talking animals, mind readers, and a heroine who, instead of finding a wardrobe, makes herself pass out with her best friend.”
—The Boston Globe

“Lonesomely populating a chasm in books for young readers where the magic comes from the blessed gutter.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Sophie Swankowski is the young-adult protagonist we’ve all been waiting for.”
—Bitch Magazine

A visual and conceptual conversation between two leading US photo-artists famed for their mutual explorations of race, class and power

Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems met in New York in the late 1970s, and over the next 45 years these close friends and colleagues have each produced unique and influential bodies of work around shared interests and concerns. This publication brings together over 140 photographs and video art from the 1970s through the 2010s by two of our most notable and influential photo-based artists.
Since first meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem five decades ago, Bey and Weems have maintained spirited and supportive mutual engagement while exploring and addressing similar themes: race, class, representation, and systems of power. Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue brings their work together in five thematic groupings to shed light on their unique creative visions and trajectories, and their shared concerns and principles.
Photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) had his first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then, his work has been presented internationally to critical and popular acclaim. Recent large-scale exhibitions of his photographs have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern, London. Bey’s writings on his own and others’ work are included in Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. He is a professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.
Famed for her Kitchen Table Series, among other works, Carrie Mae Weems(born 1953) explores power, class, Black identity, womanhood, and the historical past and its resonance in the present moment. In addition to photography, Weems creates video, performance and works of public art, and organizes thematic gatherings which bring together creative thinkers across a broad array of disciplines. Her work has been exhibited across the world, at venues such as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and the American Academy in Rome.

American visual artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has long cultivated a space between the classical and the commercial for her photorealistic paintings and visceral photographs. Minter’s art is characterized by an emphasis on natural textures in all of their extremes—whether that of the turquoise eyeshadow on a young woman’s face or the glittery grit on the underside of a high-heeled shoe. This monograph dedicated to her recent works presents her 2009 film Green Pink Caviar and a dozen monumental paintings as well as the processes behind such works.
In her most recent painting series, Minter is inspired by classical representations of the female bather as an artistic subject from ancient Greece to early Impressionism. She offers a contemporary version of this figure: her female subjects relax and wash themselves in modern showers, their faces and bodies partially obscured by a film of condensation on the glass separating them from the viewer. In some images the women appear as a mere blur behind the glass; in others, the rivulets of water that course down the glass plane reveal enough to identify a face or body part. The effect is a sensuousness that defies the male voyeuristic gaze seen throughout art history.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stillsthere are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence.

These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams' position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

Check out the McSweeney's Books Preview and the Q & A with Diane Williams.

 

Praise for Diane Williams:

"Let's hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one the wittiest and most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that’s not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life. Well, you figure it out. All I know is that this book is an amazement, composed with a stricture that guarantees splendor."
—Sam Lipsyte

"Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde. Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird."
—Jonathan Franzen

"She is one of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt."
—Lydia Davis

"The uncanny has met its ideal delivery system: the stories of Diane Williams."
—Ben Marcus

"These stories are the Giacometti walking man, the Cornell box, that extraordinary object born out of a genius for expressing the inner murmur of the mind. Each page is like throwing open the window in an electrical storm—strange sky, air full of voltage, and inside, a square of brave. Diane Williams is hilarious, brilliant, eccentric, powerful, and, luckily, ours."
—Deb Olin Unferth

"Vicky Swanky is a Beauty and Diane Williams is a genius. She is also a hero who 'resurrect(s) glee' in the face off with mortality. Her stories are sensationally complex; sorrow and hilarity, melancholy and wonder mingle, rendering this surpassingly winning collection, her seventh, quite extraordinary."
—Christine Schutt

"'Vicky Swanky' is Williams at her best, shaking us awake again to the persistent strangeness of human life."
—Jenny Hendrix, The Boston Globe

 

"The shorts in Diane Williams's Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney's) emit an unsettling brilliance, becoming, on repeated readings, even stranger and more revelatory."
—Vanity Fair 

“To read these delightful stories is simply to drop in on random encounters as they are occurring—tense, awkward, jokey, fraught.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Even without the cameo appearances by the character ‘Diane Williams,’ it’s unlikely that anyone who’s attempted to tease apart a handful of Williams’s stories will forget her linguistic precision, the ways she whittles sentences into solid gems, or her wonderfully strange way of seeing.”
—The Millions

“There is also the pleasure of Williams’s sentences…dense and different. They pop. They’re part of what makes Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty so enjoyable.”
—ZYZZYVA

“Dark, strange and revelatory”
—Time Out New York

“Equal parts satisfying, mysterious, thoughtful, and quick.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Williams’s steadfast devotion to keep experimenting has yielded another highly entertaining collection that defies any contrary urge to settle down.”
—The National

“In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, we are reminded that Diane Williams is a brilliant writer and that there is absolutely nothing preordained in this world, which is sometimes a truly great thing.”
—Bomb

“WIlliams packs elegance and drama into [her] stories… Airy and breathless, yet sturdy… like reportage from a dream.”
—Amanda DeMarco, Dalkey Archive Review of Contemporary Fiction

In his latest book, the great American fashion photographer Arthur Elgort presents photographs of women that he has taken throughout his career, in homage to their power, their beauty, their joy and their strength. Depicting a variety of subjects, from young ballerinas at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg to snapshots of fashion’s most influential women, this collection portrays many aspects of femininity across generations. Designed in the style of his classic 1994 book Arthur Elgort’s Models Manual (by the same designer, Steve Hiett), and printed on sumptuous matte paper with a vinyl cover, this book combines text and photographs in one seamless flow, deploying a rich range of color with graphic snap. Featured here are idols such as supermodels Gia Carangi, Cindy Crawford, Karen Elson, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, and legendary editors such as Franca Sozzani, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and Polly Allen Mellen, a former editor at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Allure.

Arthur Elgort (born 1940) studied painting at Hunter College but quickly transitioned to photography, finding painting too slow and solitary. Elgort attributes much of his spontaneous and liberated style to his lifelong love of music and dance, especially jazz and ballet. In his long career he has worked on many major advertising campaigns, including for Chanel, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, shot countless fashion spreads and published several books; his most recent publication is Jazz (2018).

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television.

Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard’s past selves from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women’s libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

Praise for Rerun Era

Chicago Review of Books, “Best Books of Oct 2019”
Literary Hub, “Twelve Books You Should Read This October” (2019)

”Rerun Era is both a romp and a deep dive through a late-70s-and-80s childhood, where many of us were remanded to the television for caretaking, fueled on the intoxicants of processed foods, where the day was vast and sometimes, particularly if you were down south, crushing with heat or emptiness or endless lots of red mud. There is a warm hilarity that moves through this book and a kind of cracking pain that follows. It’s a story of time, family, culture, and subjectivity we all need to read, written with a wild, quiet, and wide intelligence.”
—Renee Gladman

“Children are given the gift and burden of feeling the infinite in a single afternoon, an hour, an event—Rerun Era, a wonderfully tactile and intimate book, returns that gift to its readers. Each chapter explodes with the force and shine of fireworks on an unlit night.”
—Catherine Lacey

“Joanna Howard has a masterful understanding of the way memory bends time and forms startling new structures from the patterns of good sameness, bad sameness, strange sameness that compose our lives. She tunnels through this sameness to the glorious specificity at its core, so that these swathes of childhood recaptured feel like they belong to me, even though I know that I never witnessed my own life with such penetrating beauty or insight. Rerun Era is startling and new on every page, a book that you will find yourself in, lose yourself in, and long to return to again and again.”
—Alexandra Kleeman

“Joanna Howard’s memoir, Rerun Era, is a meditation on the uncertainties of memory. Though ‘meditation’ is maybe not the right word. Perhaps ‘attempt’ is better. Like an attempt to scale a wall, an attempt to capture the flag, an attempt on someone’s life. It is like a meditation, but more sweaty, surprising, and funnier than I generally think of meditations to be. What I’m trying to say is rather than sitting back and letting the memories flicker through, Howard hustles around—in a sort of breathless, sometimes wacky game of slow-mo sunset tag with her past—where the rules are always changing and no one really seems to mind. Like the world of childhood it mostly lives within, Rerun Era is mysterious and familiar. Howard has a way of echolocating difficult histories of family and trauma—of the ever-shifting meanings of America even—that is compelling and surprising and kind. Reading this book is like pressing your face up against an old TV screen, letting the rainbow of glowing points shimmer right through you. Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Which I think could describe the central mechanism at work here, but with a slight update: The past is never dead—it’s just gone into reruns.”
—Justin Carder, EM Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, Oakland, CA

Joanna Howard’s small, compelling memoir will hook you from the opening page. Recounting the author’s childhood in rural Oklahoma, Rerun Era is told in short, vivid bursts, and each scene blends events in Howard’s life–including her father’s sudden, devastating illness–with the sentiments of the pop culture she was steeped in as a young person living in America during the 1970s and 80s. Her family members are Dickensian for their comic timing and dynamism, but Howard’s prose is striking, precise, and never showy. Rerun Era is powerful little book from a gifted writer.
—Liv Stratman, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, CA

Joanna Howard’s Rerun Era is like if Violet Beauregard had an episode of MTV’s Cribs, giving a tour of her Oklahoma hometown, her dad’s cool boat, all her favorite TV shows, and a catalogue of childhood injuries. But Rerun Era is also a sometimes painful exploration of the strangeness of childhood and flawed family dynamics, including an angsty older brother and a lovable but troubled father. Joanna Howard perfectly captured my childhood obsession with the idyllic life of woodland creatures who lived in cozy little abodes inside hollowed trees in such a real and true way. I loved this book.
—Katie Tomzynski, Alley Cat Books, San Francisco, CA

“An elliptical and elusive memoir that skips back and forth across time and circles back on itself as the author comes to terms with events and circumstances in a way that she couldn’t comprehend as a young child…when coming-of-age in hardscrabble Oklahoma didn’t seem as toxic as she would later realize it was, when her parents’ marriage wasn’t as unstable as it would soon prove to be, and when TV reruns, turning time into something of a jigsaw puzzle, seemed as real as whatever she was experiencing in her so-called real life… Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child’s observations with an adult’s insights.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The thing about eras is that, someday, they’re bygone, and Howard records this one with clarity and a kind of reverence. This is both funny and touching, and likely to reach readers in wholly unexpected ways.”
—Booklist

“This is a short, fast, laugh-out-loud read, but it’s sticky; Rerun Era will keep playing in the reader’s mind like the earworms of childhood.”
—Buzzfeed

“Rerun Era captures the sounds, smells, and emotional tenor of growing up in rural Oklahoma. Entwined with Howard’s memories of countrified TV and movies (she loved Smoky and the Bandit even more than Robin Hood) are those of her cheating, truck-driving father and her women’s rights activist mother. Together, these memories portray a part of America—and its provincial popular culture—rarely explored in literature.”
—Lit Hub

Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC  who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

What role does a mother play in raising thoughtful, generous children? In her literary debut, internationally award-winning writer Courtney Zoffness considers what we inherit from generations past—biologically, culturally, spiritually—and what we pass on to our children. Spilt Milk is an intimate, bracing, and beautiful exploration of vulnerability and culpability. Zoffness relives her childhood anxiety disorder as she witnesses it manifest in her firstborn; endures brazen sexual advances by a student in her class; grapples with the implications of her young son’s cop obsession; and challenges her Jewish faith. Where is the line between privacy and secrecy? How do the stories we tell inform who we become? These powerful, dynamic essays herald a vital new voice.

Read excerpts from Spilt Milk courtesy of The Paris Review, Guernica, and Lit Hub.

 

Praise for Spilt Milk

“(K)eenly perceptive… masterful essays in a fresh, vulnerable voice readers will want to hear more of.”  
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

“(M)oves back and forth through time with an elegant quickness that insightfully captures how the past shapes who we are and who we might become.” 
—Booklist (starred review)

 

“In her layered storytelling, (Zoffness) brings empathy to every situation and often finds empathy for herself along the way. Spilt Milk is a generous, warm debut from an already prizewinning writer.”
—Book Page (starred review)

 

“Each essay is just as thoughtful and smart and well-told as the last one — don’t miss this.
—Alma Magazine

“In Spilt Milk, Courtney Zoffness, with compassionate clarity, exposes herself—her worst fears, her best hopes—to expose her art.”
—The Masters Review

“A slim, tender collection of essays.”
—Good Morning America

“lyrical and brilliant in the way a jewel reveals many facets at different angles.”
—Jewish Boston

“A graceful debut.”
—Kirkus

“In this collection of essays, Courtney Zoffness tackles motherhood in a way that is simultaneously fresh and achingly relatable… Zoffness recreates tender, moving, and poetic moments that will etch their way into your brain and heart for a very long time. We should be so lucky to get more work from the young writer.”
—Apartment Therapy

“Searching and exquisitely-wrought.”
—Brevity Magazine

“I don’t know what I love the most about Courtney Zoffness’s Spilt Milk. The taut originality of the prose? The acuity of its insights? The daring vulnerability? There is so much I want to say about Spilt Milk, but honestly they’re all variations of This is fucking brilliant. Whatever you think this book is, it’s more. A debut writer this talented and skilled is an event in itself.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Pym

 

“Gentle, playful and laced with subtle wit, these essays are a welcome balm in an insane and un-gentle time.”
—Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior

“Spilt Milk contains the wisdom of a mother, the maturity of an older sister, and the wide-eyed wonder of a small child. It’s a magical gift of a collection.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“In these ten musical, open-hearted essays, Courtney Zoffness establishes herself as one of our most soulful, clear-eyed narrators. A lucid dream of a book I wished would never end.”
—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

“Wry and masterful—Spilt Milk examines the multiplicities of self and culture, asking the tough questions with remarkable concision. Courtney Zoffness is a writer of supernatural acuity and wit.”
—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

 

“Spilt Milk is current, self-examining, honest, insightful, biting, and funny. Essentially, a perfect book.”
—Jesse Eisenberg, actor and playwright, author of Bream Gives me Hiccups and Other Stories

 

“Perhaps you have heard that being a mother of small children is hard, especially so right now, and finally, here is a book of essays that don’t cover up the messiness, the oddness, the love and the sadness and the worry all at once. Unsanitized and beautiful.”
—Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here and owner of Books Are Magic

 

“Courtney Zoffness’s collection is written with a fierce and sometimes funny honesty. Zoffness explores motherhood and daughterhood, and how these early attachments make us and unmake us, how they connect us to others—until they are us.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

 

“These bright, knowing essays spill over with intelligence and wit. Courtney Zoffness traces the dizzying conflict faced by parents—the daily ricochet between burden and joy—and, with a sharply lyric voice, discovers hidden connections between this domestic struggle and the larger cultural and political winds shifting around us.”
—Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

“On one level, Spilt Milk is an extraordinary exploration of the connections, small and large; real and imagined, between childhood and parenthood. On another level, it’s irrefutable proof that Courtney Zoffness is a wondrous calculus of a prose writer: keen, inventive, candid, open-hearted, not to mention one helluva stylist.”

—Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math