Another memoir at #8–Willie Morris’s North Toward Home, written in 1967. I read this in the summer of Black Lives Matter and there are plenty of jarring moments as Morris describes growing up white in segregated Mississippi. But he makes it out, first to Texas and then to New York City, and when he does […]
Sarah Broom earned rave reviews in 2019 with The Yellow House. It’s a memoir of one Black family’s experience in New Orleans East, built around the frame of a shotgun house that did not survive Katrina. It’s a dreamy sort of book, and by that I mean elusive. But the storytelling and the characters are […]
For the last four years, I’ve been producing a list of Best Reads to end the year on Heartlands. It’s an eclectic collection and should not be mistaken for one of those Top Ten lists of books that actually appeared in print during the current year. Especially this year when the pandemic sent me back […]
In her 2019 book, The Absent Hand:Reimagining our American Landscape, (our Heartlands favorite read last year), Suzannah Lessard described the place where we are just now as atopia, a realm in which place has lost its old meaning because the kind of things that used to define our world, primarily our work, shape our physical […]
“I would have nothing against calling my anthology a book of enchantments.” (xx) –Czeslaw Milosz Czesław Milosz not only has a difficult name for English speakers to get their tongues around, his poetry is also difficult. But in 1996 he edited a collection of poems that is full, as he says in the introduction, “of […]
