My book, Ancestor Trouble, is anticipated this month by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the Millions, the Chicago Review of Books, Apartment Therapy, Goodreads readers. Esquire has named it one of the best books of the year so far.
I don’t ordinarily link to my newsletters here nowadays, but I’m making an exception for the latest, “The Truth Will Set You Free.” It’s about how wrestling with wrongs of my ancestors, rather than being a miserly, judgmental, closed-off process, has been an incredible opening. I’m also giving away an advance copy of Ancestor Trouble. And there are some good links . . .
My friend Terry Teachout, a theater and arts critic, a biographer, playwright, and librettist in his own right, first known to me as a blogger, died suddenly last week. I’ve struggled to express what a shock and loss his absence is. Terry loved to laugh and was a delight to laugh with. He loathed pretension. He enjoyed wit. When we . . .
This year I abandoned the novel I worked on for ages. Fragments survive in the novel I’m working on now, but it’s a fundamentally different book, and that feels great. For years, I resisted writing a nonfiction book first, because I really didn’t want to write a memoir. But it turned out that (1) I really did need, as several . . .