Christmas 2017, Dear Friends

Dear Family and Friends, This year there will be no Christmas mustache. I do not refer to my face. I refer to our hearth, which Tizi has adorned the past few years with a horizontal wreath. In the off-season she collects holiday greenery and reddery. She’ll say, “Hey, let’s stop at English Gardens.” Definitely my…More

In the Context of Love, a review

The first scene tells us so much. In Linda Sienkiewicz’s novel, In the Context of Love, in the very first scene a woman and her two children visit the husband-father in prison. The encounter is shot through with awkwardness: bewildered children, humiliated wife, appalling institutional sterility. “The four of us sat at a metal table,”…More