Can you even imagine a more perfect cover for a book to bear for an event such as this? From the outside, it appears the quintessential Irish collection. The title, too, conjures up images of lush landscapes, farms bound by stone fences, above which a leprechaun or pixie might peer
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down is Alice Walker's second collection of stories. It was published seven years after Walker published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms Magazine. (Walker, with Charlotte D. Hunt, had finally found Hurston's unmarked grave and marked it with a modest
After I finished reading the fourteenth story in All Aunt Hagar's Children, I thought how about steadily impressed I'd been with the crafting of these stories. Each of them seemed to possess that kind of "I could tell you stories all day" attitude, like the stories were just a collection of
It's been a long time since a book inspired me to create a Spelling It Out.* Generally speaking, it coincides with an author's shifting onto my MRE lists (Must Read Everything). Consider it official: Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere makes her a MRE author for me, and now I'll
Some reading months are just really exciting, right? That's my January 2012. Some of the thrills are pretty specific. For instance, my First Amazing Read of 2012, Edem Awumey's Dirty Feet (House of Anansi, 2011); I actually read it twice in January. Whenever I finish a book with that "Must
