Blog Entries

Love and Fury by Samantha Silva examines the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, a groundbreaking feminist and mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Devoted to breaking free of the constraints that bound women of her time, Wollstonecraft was a passionate and unorthodox woman who carved her own path in life using her fierce intellect and gift for words.

Part Soviet history, part family biography, Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning is a thought-provoking look at how trauma can echo down generations. For Halberstadt, born in Moscow in the 1970s, the past has always hung over his family’s lives like an ever-present specter. His paternal grandfather was one of Stalin’s last surviving bodyguards and a major in the KGB, a job that made him culpable in some of the brutal crimes carried out by the State.

Meg Rhys is a textbook example of a “spinster librarian”. In her forties, she spends most of her time in the local history stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library, and the rest of the time living hermetically in her apartment with her dead sister’s cat and her dead sister’s ghost, staunchly resistant to any suggestions of change. Enter Ellis Williams, a charming library patron seeking assistance in figuring out whether his family’s home might have a ghost of its own.