“‘Truly, through the process of alchemy, many miracles shall be wrought.’” Emilia Serafina, the heroine of Nonna’s Book of Mysteries, clings to these words from her great-great-great grandmother’s strange book, A Manual to... Read More

Via the “cultural machine” that is California, Americans have derived divinity and desire from the synthetic and the superficial. Television is reality. Neighbors are strangers. Funerals have disc jockeys. And to many, nothing seems... Read More

Stories have tremendous power to provide a sense of belonging to a people, a culture, and a place; narrative provides a context in which a strong sense of personal and community identity can be formed. Even people who live at the margins... Read More

In his speech, “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama quoted William Faulkner (“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”) to embody the idea that even though leaders no longer need to list the racial injustices of the... Read More

Everything most of us think we know about how nature works is wrong. In fact, the traditional or “classic” mechanical explanations for why objects behave the way they do are fundamentally incorrect. Only with an understanding of... Read More

"Over the Cliff" is old wine in a new bottle. In a 1964 article in Harper’s Magazine, Richard Hofstadter described “the paranoid style in American politics.” Amato and Neiwert offer a detailed and contemporary accounting of that... Read More

In Kim Dana Kupperman’s first book, the reader moves through what Kupperman terms “missives”—short meditations on life that traverse Kupperman’s biography and the globe. We hear in “missives” the shadow of the word... Read More

Susan Newman’s latest book, "Under One Roof Again", is an indispensable how-to guide for the modern family. In this uncertain economy it is no longer taboo for families to live together as adults under one roof. Whether it’s the... Read More