Joe Torra’s loosely connected The My Ground Trilogy tells the stories of three working-class, Boston area people—each of whom is trying to crawl out from under. Gas Station is a slice of everyday life that reveals the thoughts of a boy who works more than he plays. Weathering the tedium, frustration and occasional fearsome excitement of events in his immigrant father’s business with a kid’s interest and an adult’s sense of responsibility, the narrator puts the reader in a gritty, greasy garage that somehow relates to everyone’s transition out of childhood. In the second novel, Tony Luongo is a slick-dealing salesman in Pratt’s department store who juggles the effects of his Italian-American upbringing, marriage, parenthood and his own obsessive sexuality with post-war social and political change swirling past him. The endless stream of mental observations brings the reader through territory that is as real and affecting as it is unsettling. In the final installment, My Ground, Torra again explores the working class experience in urban Massachusetts. Forty-year-old Laurel Bell, negotiates through past trauma and present depression to support herself as a poor single woman. Simple, yet vivid detail reveals her mental and emotional process as she constantly tries to reconcile the past and present sufficiently to make sense of her reality. Hubert Selby, Jr said “The story telling has a wonderful sense of imagination, intelligence, economy and originality…” “Torra’s evocation of the… twisted white-trash milieu is brilliantly done, creating an uneasy portrait of life on the fringes of sanity and society,” wrote the London Times and, the New York Times Book Review stated, “If words were lug nuts, Joseph Torra would spin them in ways the guys down at the garage never dreamed of.”

My Ground Trilogy

Literature & Fiction

Torra, Joseph

Contemporary

What is Told, (A New York Times Notable Book), is a masterful novel that sprints across generations, centuries and continents. In a spirited narrative that travels from old Ukraine to New Jersey, Askold Melnyczuk follows his character through the betrayals of war and the promises of marriage. Zenon and Natalka Zabobon marry the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo. When Natalka wins the battle of the bedroom, Zenon throws his energies into making sure his country doesn’t completely disappear from the map. His brother Stefan, meanwhile, renounces the abstractions of nationalism for the certain pleasures of Paris and his two mistresses, a mother and daughter. Transplanted to the strange soil of the new world by the upheavals of World War II, the family finds itself unprepared for the subtle sabotages of peacetime suburbia. With the ghosts of their extraordinary past never far away, the voyagers resort to the strategies learned in the struggle again the Tartars, Nazis, and Communists. The results are as comic as they are unexpected. In What is Told Askold Melnyczuk reinvents with humor and compassion, the story of a people long hidden behind the Iron Curtain. His novel is a reminder that history is not something that happens only to others. Philip Patrick, of The Boston Globe called the novel, “Magnificent in scope” continuing “Brilliantly Melnyczuk skips across decades and continents….His blend of myth and realism — punctuated with violence and comedy — recalls Garcia Marquez.” And, Alida Becker, of The New York Times Book Review said “To fall in love with Melnyczuk’s voice is no trouble at all….”

What Is Told

Melnyczuk, Askold

A Four-Sided Bed

Searle, Elizabeth

Ambassador of the Dead

One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Ada Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. Ada summons Nick back to his old Ukranian-American New Jersey neighborhood, where something unspeakable has just happened-exactly what, no one is willing to say. To find out, Nick sets off on a journey through the past, his own as well as that of Ada's son, Alex, who long has struggled to escape his family's legacy of violence. A harrowing tale about friendship and love, America and the immigrant's dream, Ambassador of the Dead introduces Ada Kruk, a mother like no other, at once Mary and Medea, Sarah and Medusa. A study of ambitions gone awry and appetites too easily gratified, this novel is also an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the price of love. Dan Cryer of Newsday labeled Ambassador of the Dead “…Artistic gold” calling Melnyczuk “an able analyst of character and a superb storyteller.” And, Esquire magazine said “A novel so precise and understated it’s stunning.”

Music In and On the Air is a wonderful collection of radio pieces from Pulitzer Prize winning critic Lloyd Schwartz. The book explores contemporary classics, musical theatre and film, and includes almost all the reviews Schwartz has presented since becoming  the classical music critic for NPR's Fresh Air. Offering  up reflections on performers and composers, from Bolet to Horowitz, Cole Porter to Elvis Costello, Casals to Toscanini—Schwartz brings us closer to music in the air. Host Terry Gross said it best: “Lloyd is my favorite classical music critic and I’ve been privileged to present him on Fresh Air. That he writes so knowledgeably about movie musicals makes me love him even more. He’s a poet, of course, and his gift for language makes him a pleasure to listen to as well as to read.”

Music In and On the Air

Arts & Photography

Schwartz, Lloyd

Music

The Calling is the story of Blackford "Toad" Turlow, an ambitious, impressionable young man who aspires to be a writer. The voice in his head is that of Eldon Odom, a famous — sometimes infamous — novelist to whom Toad apprentices himself. In the beginning, Toad devours every morsel from Odom, both words and actions. But along the way he learns far more than the art of crafting fiction. He discovers that behind Odom's genius is a warped human being who abuses himself and those around him with alcohol, drugs and debauchery. Instead of teaching his eager disciples about writing, Odom uses them to fulfill his base desires. But Toad listens carefully to "The Old Man," the writer who years before was Odom's own mentor and who describes himself as "just the strange boy who cared to write things down." Toad is also influenced by the echoes o f his reckless, lovable dead sister, Trish; Odom's lean and lusty girlfriend, Lindy Briggs; Odom's loving and patient wife, Miss Sully; and by Toad's own girlfriend, the knowing Ardis Baines From this boozy, brilliant cast of characters, Toad eventually learns that a man and his art are two different things, that the worth of one may far exceed the other, and that there are dangerously thin lines between creativity and madness, between dedication and obsession. The Calling is beautifully written and thoroughly engrossing novel of passion and purpose — one that tells much about the calling and the called. "The characters ...are vividly realized, resistant to stereotypes. And the story's three female leads — Ardis, Toad's sometime girlfriend; Missy Sully, Odom's wife; and Lindy, Odom's current mistress — are complex individuals who play out their expected roles in unexpected fashion," said Nancy Pate in her review for the Orlando Sentinel. And, the Winston Salem Journal wrote, "Watson has much to say about life and art, about creativity and obsession, about the danger of violating reasonable bounds. He says it very well."

The Calling

Watson, Sterling

Literary

More than a series of engaging anecdotes, The Family Business gives readers a glimpse into the real world of the private investigator, and how that profession's stresses can bear on family life. Funny, poignant, and informative, it taps into the bottomless curiosity readers and viewers have about the hidden aspects of life — both criminal and domestic.This memoir tells the story of a multi-generational private investigation agency, founded by Phillip DiNatale, a former Boston police detective who was chosen to be one of four investigators tasked with catching the Boston Strangler.There are revelations of some of the most interesting cases this family team has worked on over the past forty years — from cheating husbands and wives, to rape accusations, the theft of a Stradivarius violin and a Louis the XIV desk, large-scale gray-marketeering, missing children (including the son of an African dictator), wiretapping, and some widely publicized industrial accidents on Boston's "Big Dig."The Family Business offers a look beneath the surface of city life, into the minds of those who break the law — from murderers and rapists, to welfare cheats and petty thieves as well as insight into families troubled by divorce, addiction, and secrets.

The Family Business

Biographies & Memoirs

DiNatale, John

True Crime

Your brakes fail and your car plunges from a pier into a February-frigid harbor. You are thrown to safety but your four-month old daughter, trapped in her car seat, drowns. Four years after that horror, you return from a trip to the shore and lift your four-month-old son from his carrier only to realize he's dead, too, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Twenty-two years later, your 25-year old son drowns while swimming in a Malawi, Africa lake. How do you survive that first death, never mind the second, or the third? Ask Mags Riordan of County Kerry, Ireland. Only the blessing of her son Billy, the boy who later drowned, carried Mags through those first two deaths. Her reaction to Billy's loss caused Mags to do something beyond simple survival, though — it caused her to do something transformative, and remarkable. Returning to Malawi on the one-year anniversary of Billy's death, she saved the life of a local boy who would otherwise have died from a simple infection, and realized the desperate need for a medical clinic. With virtually no relevant experience, medical or otherwise, Mags founded a clinic that to date has saved and transformed the lives of tens of thousands of Malawians. If any of us wonders "What can one person do?" we need only look to Mags Riordan as a living, breathing example of someone who put aside her despair, and her comfort zone, in an effort to help and heal, proving the world truly can be changed, even by just two hands, and one single broken heart.This Is Paradise is the story of an Irish mother’s grief, an African village’s plight, and the remote medical clinic that brought fresh hope to both.

This Is Paradise: An Irish mother's grief, an African village's plight, and the medical clinic that brought fresh hope to both

Shea, Suzanne Strempek

Leaders & Notable People

The Ten Commandments of Golf Etiquette is a book for people new to the game. It offers no advice on technique; instead, it is a primer on how to behave on the golf course: how to be safe, be considerate of others, play at a good pace, and how to understand the complex etiquette and unwritten code involved in a round of golf with others. There are also brief descriptions of the most commonly-encountered rules, a list of necessary equipment, and a glossary of golf terms. This small book is designed so that the new player will step onto the course and feel immediately at home.

The Ten Commandments of Golf Etiquette: How to Make the Game More Enjoyable for Yourself and for Everyone Else on the Course

Sports & Outdoors

MERULLO, ROLAND

Golf

A charming narrative of a glorious summer of golfing, eating, and learning how to slow down and enjoy life. The best-selling author of Breakfast with Buddha, Golfing with God, Revere Beach Boulevard and others combines two of his greatest passions—travel and golf—in this humorous and poignant look at Mediterranean life. Roland Merullo was feeling a little burnt out by the frantic pace of life in the United States and decided to rent an Italian villa near the shore of Lake Como in a small town called Mezzegra. He arrived in Italy with his wife and two young daughters determined to relax, slow down, and enjoy life in the manner of their Italian hosts. Merullo also resolved to play a little golf and frequented the many gorgeous golf courses that populate the countryside. With his customary wit, he shares the entertaining account of his trip through Italy in the wonderful The Italian Summer. Composed of tales from some of Italy's finest golf courses, descriptions of the meals Merullo and his family enjoyed, and portraits of the various eccentrics they met along the way, The Italian Summer brings to life the myriad joys of Italian life in a way that all lovers of food, wine, and the proverbial "good walk spoiled" will savor. The perfect gift for golf enthusiasts and armchair travelers, The Italian Summer pays homage to a slower, richer way of life—one filled with good food, pleasant company, and beautiful surroundings. "Merullo paints a vivid portrait of a glorious adventure for golfers and gourmets . . .The Italian Summer is simply a wonderful read." — BookReporter

The Italian Summer: Golf, Food, and Family at Lake Como

Professionals & Academics

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