Side Quests: “Veer” by Cole Swensen
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Summer is often full of journeys as lovely weather and longer days conspire to stir dreams of road tripping. Allowances are made for traffic, and everyone prays that the weather holds. Then the plan goes sideways, and with the disappointment comes a bitter lesson about [...]

19
Jun
Author photo by Penelope Massouri.
The Family Legend: Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal
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It can be hard to come to terms with ancestors, especially if they’re charismatic, secretive, and unconventional. Fodder for endless gossip, they feed family legends while failing to show up for reunions or else raising eyebrows when they do. Providence poet and translator Eleni Sikelianos, [...]

29
May
The Bridge Back to You: A Foodie Romance Set in Providence
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Published last month, Providence novelist Riss M. Neilson’s The Bridge Back to You is a second-chance romance with a Providence setting and a compelling foodie angle. While romance readers will find plenty to enjoy in these pages, the novel also touches on larger themes like [...]

01
May
Happy Land : The Historical Novel Being Read Across Rhode Island
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Approaching 40 with a surly teenager, an estranged mother, and an imperious grandmother with an urgent problem, Nikki Lovejoy-Berry, the burdened protagonist of Happy Land, is—in a word—unsettled. What she learns over the course of this graceful novel is that she’s never going to feel [...]

18
Mar
Telling on Herself: Kate Colby’s Paradoxx
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“A certain unpleasant episode has taken dominion of my life,” declares the Providence writer Kate Colby in her new essay collection, “but I’m leaving it to a few light references in my life on paper.” Over the course of a year beset with difficulties, Colby [...]

25
Feb
Hectic, Antic, Frantic: The Stories of Mary Paula Hunter
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The fourteen stories collected in Can I Have a Hug First?, the second full-length work of fiction by Providence writer Mary Paula Hunter, have an enjoyably frantic energy. Charming and often very funny, Hunter’s stories feature characters, mainly women, whose response to the competing attentional [...]

21
Jan
Local Translator Brings Pacheco’s “Pandora” to English Readers
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Written by the award-winning Brazilian fabulist Ana Paula Pacheco, energetically translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches, Pandora is a strange and unsettling novel. For this reason it is also perfectly attuned to its equally strange and unsettling subject: the surreal nature of life under [...]

17
Dec
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman by Marion Orr
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For someone who was, by all accounts, quiet and reserved, Charles Coles Diggs, Jr. — Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, and icon of the Civil Rights era — lived a remarkably dramatic life of stratospheric highs followed by [...]

19
Nov
Now Go: The Insistent Story of “Little Neck” by Darcie Dennigan
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Little Neck by Providence’s Darcie Dennigan is the book that Gertrude Stein would have written, if only she’d had a side hustle in death. Told in spooky retrospect by a knowing teen who works at a gravestone-cutting shop, the novel begins with a four-sentence revelation [...]

29
Oct
No Shortcuts: ‘Ways Home: Stories’ by Karen Lee Boren
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Speaking with The Alembic after the publication of her first book, Girls in Peril (2006), the Providence writer Karen Lee Boren described adolescence “as a time when young people, often unwillingly, must recognize their separateness as individuals despite their intense connections to their friends.” In [...]

01
Oct