by Janet Rosen
No photos of their own childhoods are displayed on the piano.
“I know what it’s like to feel hated and betrayed by a woman friend. I think we all do.”
“Nationalism, for all its insistence on keeping like with like, inevitably tears families apart. Homes are bombed, children are separated from their parents. “
I could feel it in the manners, the mores, the very air around me. Vassar was a WASP institution and bastion, and I knew I didn’t entirely belong.
As Alice Rosenthal's novel of friendship, Bess and Frima, unfolds, the menace of world war is growing, and Beth and Frima must grow up fast. Balancing love, ambition, religion, family, and politics, each young woman faces challenges she never imagined in her girlhood. Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to author Alice Rosenthal about the personal history she mined to write this tender story.
Welcome to another installment of this occasional recurring feature in which Lilith staffers reveal what books are on our nightstands, our e-readers and tucked in our bags for the commute.
I do not know if Ida knows my name. She does not remember that her son Gary left me ten years ago for a twenty-two year old nurse at his hospital. I have seen Ida more often than I have seen my ex-husband, who has moved to Anchorage, Alaska and now has two sons with his second wife.
The magazine proudly spotlights both emerging and established writers. Winner receives $250 + publication. Deadline: 9/30/18.
Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Carol Zoref’s novel Barren Island is the story of a long-forgotten factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s.
The reader knows by page one of Queen for a Day that Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son is autistic, but if anyone told her, she wouldn’t listen, because she doesn’t want to know—until at last Danny’s behavior becomes so strange even she can’t ignore it. After her son’s diagnosis, Mimi finds herself in a world nearly… Read more »