Frank De Blase had a dream about a Rochester future with no guns, free parking, free health care, free pot, a new train, and cherry pie. It was raining hammers and nails when I stepped off the East Avenue EL Train — locals call it the “Slaughter Express” — and into the neon-dusted area called […]
Fiction
Posted inCulture
BOA Editions celebrates 40 years
BOA Editions’ story began much like that of other creative endeavors: When an intrepid individual identified a lack of opportunity, he went out and created it himself. One of the longest running independent presses in the nation, BOA was founded on July 4, 1976 by Al Poulin Jr., who was a Brockport professor at the […]
Posted inCulture
Swapping stories
Writers & Books this week will present a series of events with debut novelist Boris Fishman, whose critically-acclaimed, witty and moving novel, “A Replacement Life” draws on his own life experiences as an immigrant from the former USSR, and a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother of Fishman’s young protagonist, Slava Gelman, has just […]
Posted inCulture
Not with a bang but a whimper
While the daily dramas of our lives take center stage, it’s easy to take certain big things for granted, like the qualities that make Earth a “Goldilocks” situation for life as we understand it. In her debut novel, “Age of Miracles,” Karen Thompson Walker paints an intimate picture of humanity trudging through a great and […]
Posted inCulture
The expanded familiar
Writers & Books has expanded its annual “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book” program by introducing a Debut Novel Series, which seeks to familiarize Rochester audiences with authors who have recently published their first books. The first work in the new series is “The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing” by Mira Jacob, who visited […]
