Stumbling Upon The Town and the City By Mike McCormick One Sunday in late April, I wandered with my friend Matt as he pointed out his favorite businesses in an upscale shopping district on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-minute ferry ride west of Seattle. As we sauntered, I remembered days during…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Hill of Beans, the newest novel by Les Epstein, for 36 years head of the Boston University Creative Writing Program and author of 11 books, including King of the Jews, San Remo Drive, and Pandaemonium, is another of this writer’s novels…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Instructions for a Heatwave is another intriguing narrative about a dysfunctional family by Northern Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell. Set in a 1976 heatwave in the U.K., the novel focuses on the family of Gretta Riordan, an Irish grandmother,…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Persist by Massachusetts Senator and failed Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is the kind of memoir that breathes life into a policy tract. Warren’s campaign mantra was that for each of society’s problems, she had a plan. She still…
A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day By Stephen O’Connor “I never heard a singer as good as Liam, ever. He was the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life, and still is.” —Bob Dylan, 1986 Somewhere around 1982, not long after the noon hour on a Saturday,…
Derwin at the End of a Scribble By David Daniel He almost always came to class (maybe only because it was a place to be). He always sat in the back of the room, always with a fine-point Sharpie in hand in perpetual motion. Sometimes I would call on him:…
More than 34,000 Lowell residents voted in the November 4, 1942, state election. Besides selecting state officers and local representatives, the people of Lowell also chose by a margin of 16,477 to 14,135 to replace the existing Plan B form of government (a strong mayor and city councilors both elected…
Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s latest novel, “The Year of Lost and Found,” again takes place on Ireland’s fictional Finfarran peninsula. It is a novel about ordinary people with extraordinary secrets. Set in 2018, it takes place in the lead-up to the year of Ireland’s Civil War commemorations, and explores shared, hidden, and…
This post originally ran on March 12, 2021, but it’s being repeated here as a reminder of the approaching contest deadline. ATLANTIC CURRENTS II Enter Your Original Writing—Compete for Cash Prizes Attention, writers! Alumni and students of UMass Lowell and University College Cork are invited to submit original prose…
Eric Linder’s new book is The Blue in the Eye of the Girl at La Jolla: New & Selected Poems. His work has appeared in Harvard Magazine, The Quarterly, and The Annual of Light Verse and Funny Poems. He has owned Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod…