Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula

One. In high school Peggy Paula worked as a waitress at the Perkins. Night shifts were her favorite, kids from her school would come in after games or dances with bleary eyes and messy hair and Peggy Paula knew they’d been drinking and smoking those flimsy joints she’d see them passing, the girls with smudged makeup and rats nests in the back of their heads, proud unblinking eyes, scanning the dining room like I dare you, I dare you to guess what I just let Jared or Steve or Casey do to me, I let him and I liked it and I don’t care, and Peggy Paula honored just to be near these girls, envious, taking their orders for French fries and Ranch, keeping their secrets and the sticky lipgloss tubes they’d sometimes leave behind, watermelon and cherry and berry and once a spicy cinnamon that burned Peggy Paula’s lips for an hour, what kind of girl wanted burning lips, poison lips,

1979–97, Hartford, CT (“Insurance City”)

I

I sing for the Hartford Whalers:
I mourn for a hockey team
that never, like Ahab’s sailors,
dreamed the implausible dream,
or went down as hopeless flailers,
failing in the extreme.
They skated around their rink
and couldn’t exactly sink.

As colorful as the history and mythology of moonshine is, absinthe’s may be even more lurid. The herb-flavored and herb-tinted liquor was known as the “Green Fairy” and developed a following among the artists, writers and other bohemians living in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its devotees claimed that it promoted visions, that it was more psychoactive than mere alcohol. It was reported that Van Gogh cut off his ear under the deranging influence of absinthe.

Available from Knopf.

Gorgeous, arresting, profoundly vivid . . . Danticat once again tells a story that feels as mysterious and magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel. Claire Limyè Lanmè (‘Claire of the Sea Light’) is turning seven, and yet her birthday has always been marked by both death and renewal. Claire’s mother died in childbirth, and she has been raised by her fisherman father in a shack near the sea. The book begins on the morning of her birthday, before winding back to tell the story of every previous birthday, and who lived, and died, each year. For some time, Claire’s father has considered giving her [away], and the heartbreaking question of Claire’s fate adds to the novel’s suspense, as both the past, and this single day, unfold. In the meantime, Danticat paints a stunning portrait of this small Haitian town, in which the equally impossible choices of life and death play out every day.  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the best-selling author of Brother, I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker: a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.

Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire’s mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother’s grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life.

But on the night of Claire’s seventh birthday, when at last he makes the wrenching decision to do so, she disappears. As Nozias and others look for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed among the community of men and women whose individual stories connect to Claire, to her parents, and to the town itself. Told with piercing lyricism and the economy of a fable, Claire of the Sea Light is a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores what it means to be a parent, child, neighbor, lover, and friend, while revealing the mysterious bonds we share with the natural world and with one another. Embracing the magic and heartbreak of ordinary life, it is Edwidge Danticat’s most spellbinding, astonishing book yet.

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Masha Hamilton is the author of five novels, including The Camel Bookmobile and 31 Hours. Her latest, What Changes Everything, braids together stories of Americans far from the front line whose lives are irretrievably linked and changed by America’s longest-running conflict, and explores the grace of unexpected human connections in a world often too harsh and dangerous to face alone.

Stela, September 10th

Dorogoi Mr. Chomsky,

Greetings, or privyet, as I would like to be able to salute you; I know you must know your Russian given your parents’ background. My name is Stela Sidorova, I am 56 years old and immigrated from the Soviet Union with my then-husband when I was only 20 years old. We moved to Ohio, where I now own and run a used bookstore. Alone, I might add. My husband, the chyort, deserted me nine years after our arrival here. I should have pounded his balls, but he was not a real man as you are, a man who stayed with his wife and supported his offspring. Oh well, forgive my frankness as I have forgiven him. At least he contributed to the creation of two little boys who then became mine alone. And because of him, I learned I must pray to God, but keep rowing to shore—an important lesson.

When I was a young boy, there was no greater adventure in the world than visiting my grandparents’ ranch in Eastern Montana. Among the things that made this place magical were the people who populated the area, including a kid my age named Kelly Kornaman. Kelly was a typical ranch kid…tough but shy, quiet but very easy to talk to once you got to know him. He had a perfectly round face, and a high cackling laugh that always made me laugh along with him.

I am driving up a mountain pass on my tractor,
a blue plume behind me, when I spot
an abandoned car on the side of the road
with no license plates. I am just cresting
the pass, my speed has slowed; I could almost
step off this tractor, I think, and start over,
and try something totally different,
like breaking both my ankles, I think, because
stepping off a moving tractor is so different
than say stepping off your back porch,
and the car is on blocks and all the wheels are gone.

Perhaps by now—if not within minutes or hours—most discussion of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, will be crowded from the news cycle. What on earth could be more compelling to Americans than serious talk about the role of bias in jury deliberation, or gun laws and cultural codes of firearm manliness, or voting rights, or who really gets to stand their ground in America?

A slice of moon bleeds blue on wind-swept snow
And bares my secret in its lambent rush.
Short angled shadows stage a midnight show.
A slice of moon bleeds blue on wind-swept snow,
Exposing me beneath its crescent glow.
My best-kept secret, naked in night’s hush.
A slice of moon bleeds blue on wind-swept snow
And makes light of my secret in its rush.