In the Bernese German dialect, “grossmeer,” or grandmother, translates literally to “large ocean,” and the sense the narrator has of their own beloved but often troubling Grossmeer reflects this vast, enveloping unknowability. As Grossmeer’s condition declines, the narrator sets out to compile the stories that form the complex throughline from their cloistered childhood in the …
It’s 1954, and May, once a child star molded by an ambitious, domineering mother, now drifts between dimly lit taverns in “Drinkers City,” a fictional, archetypal nightlife world “just past Respectability and Sobriety,” before her journey later takes her to Los Angeles. At Ace’s Bar, where her husband and his brother preside uneasily, she drinks, …
Thirteen-year-old Elma Quill’s family isn’t like any other—people believe that her grandfather Jonathan is crazy, her mother, Patricia, has recently come back from the dead, and her father, Jason, is missing. In a quaint Victorian farmhouse in Oklahoma, Patricia calls a meeting so that Elma can hear the full story of her family’s treasure, though …
Former classmates at St. Anthony of Padua elementary school in Springhaven, Pennsylvania, come together to organize a gathering 55 years after their graduation in 1964. The process of planning for the event brings back memories of childhood friendships, rivalries, infatuations, and heartbreaks at this Catholic institution, named after a saint who receives prayers to restore …
The Glory Peak Ski Resort is founded in 1966 by Bill Macklemore, a World War II veteran–turned–ski instructor who developed a site near Fortooth into a premier skiing destination (it is said that “Fortooth was one of those towns where reality was far more potent than myth”). His devotion to his business is so all-encompassing …
What does it mean for the world to end? Spanish author Levi’s novel takes up that question both literally and figuratively. Largely structured as 19-year-old narrator Little Lea’s tale of her life, which she’s recounting to a man in search of his lost dog, this novel reckons with the appeal and dangers of home. “I …
