Set in Wisconsin and Saint Louis, MO in the early 1900s, this story about a wife who pretends to be pure when she really has a history as a party girl (though they didn't call them that back then) was hard to put down. Nonetheless, I didn't really like it. The writing is off-putting. The author k...
It was the 1950's, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal. For one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal." To all appearances, he and his family lived a...
“Going to the Wall,” we called it, and there quickly developed an entire protocol of behavior for how to do it in company. Never look at anybody else’s screen. Never hoot if no cash was forthcoming. This last part did not ever, ever happen to me. Previously, when dinner wa...
She was born that way. She lived in a falling-down old clapboard house way out on the edge of town with the other black folks, with an idiot daughter nobody had seen since she was a baby so maybe she was there and maybe she wasn’t, and maybe she was an idiot and maybe not. Claudie lived in the la...
It was a month and two days after my fourth birthday. I was a handsome little boy, beautiful my mother said. I didn’t look a thing like I look now. I looked hopeful. I looked as though life was riveting with possibility. I was in my mother and fathe...