Letters to God

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Marilyn French

Marilyn French takes us into the private hell that became her life when, in 1992, after a series of false diagnoses, it was determined that she had esophageal cancer - from the grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy to the subsequent coma from which it was thought she had no chance of recovering, to the even more serious post-coma illnesses, to her miraculous return to life. With the insight, intelligence, and emotional honesty with which she has examined so many other women's lives in her fiction, Marilyn French now considers her own, as she battles with doctors and the medical establishment; as her family and friends surround her, giving her mysterious strength; and as she defies all diagnoses and prognostications and emerges whole and more than ever open to life. While this book is a consideration of what it feels like to be dying, and as such it is a musing on death, it is also centered on life: death has cast a mark on life which gives us a new vision of meaning and purpose. As French examines death's role in her life, she shares a sense of what pain and suffering can mean to a person who utterly denies transcendent thought, of how an experience of closeness to death affects the life we are living now.

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Gena Dagel Caponi

Paul Bowles serves as an introduction to this enigmatic figure. Caponi discusses all of Bowles's novels: The Sheltering Sky, the first American novel to articulate an existential philosophy; Let It Come Down, a further exploration of existentialism; The Spider's House, which explores the fall of the French colonial regime and the aftermath from the point of view of a Moroccan; and the thriller Up Above the World. In addition to the novels, Caponi examines Bowles's other writings - the poetry, travel essays, and stories - and also touches on his musical compositions. Accompanying her critical examination is extensive material from Caponi's illuminating interviews with Bowles. The quintessential introduction to an unusual figure in American literature, Paul Bowles will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, and music.

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Kathryn Lasky

After her family immigrates to America from Italy in 1903, ten-year-old Sofia is quarantined at the Ellis Island Immigration Station, where she makes a good friend but endures nightmarish conditions. Includes historical notes.

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Susanna Sonnenberg

Sonnenberg's memoir illuminates her resolve to forge her independence, to become a woman capable of trust and to be a good mother to her own children after being raised by a mother who was a compulsive liar and a drug user.