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5 Stars Silly Frilly Grandma Tillie Laurie A, Jacobs Anne Jewett Flashlight Press 32 Pages Ages: 5 and up Inside Jacket:  Sophie and Chloe are lucky that their Grandma Tillie knows how to be royally silly. To their delight, whenever Grandma Tillie babysits she seems to disappear, only to be replaced by a parade of [...]

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We hope you’re enjoying the holiday season! The hard-working elves at First Book are doing everything they can to get new books into the hands of kids in need this winter, and you’ve got the chance to do the same.

Your generous donations to First Book have a significant impact – $2.50 provides a new book for a child from a low-income home, and this holiday season, our friends at Disney are matching every $1 donation with another new book. Click here to donate to First Book.

But there are other ways you can get new books to kids in need! There are all kinds of great companies who support our mission, so you can make a difference while taking care of your holiday shopping:

• Build-A-Bear Workshop will donate 50 cents to First Book for every Read Teddy they sell this Christmas season. This stuffed bear is fuzzy, cute, and has a jaunty expression we’re quite fond of.
• philosophy is donating 100% of the net proceeds from all sales of their sweet dreams fresh cream shampoo, shower gel & bubble bath to First Book. Do good and feel good!
• Altruette makes all sorts of beautiful charms, and donates half the proceeds of every sale to a the cause represented by the charm. Lovely! This Christmas, sales of their ABC Book Charm will benefit First Book.
• Baking for Good is a great online bakery where every purchase supports your choice of a great big list of charitable causes. When you buy all the cookies you could possibly want and/or afford, enter “First Book” as the cause you want to support, and 15% of your order will go to provide new books for kids in need.
• I See Me! makes really cool personalized books for kids – stories with a special child’s name in them. And when you check out, if you enter “firstbook” as a coupon code, they’ll will donate 10% of sales to First Book … plus you’ll get 10% off your order.

You can find more about these great partners, and others like them, on our website. Good luck with your holiday shopping!

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As the founding editor of Ploughshares and the former Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry has stirred, ushered, and promoted all manner of writerly dreams. He's put first stories into print and published the work of our greatest living (and sometimes not living) authors. He's sat in classrooms, seducing and exhorting.  He's said to others, You can. You will. 

With his memoir, Sweet Dreams (Hidden River Press), Henry traces and comes nearly to terms with his own fantasies and emergent needs, as he tells the story of his rising and his wanting. Much of the book is devoted to a childhood and adolescence spent in the very swath of the suburban Philadelphia that I have, since my eighth-grade year at Radnor Middle School, called my own, and so I turned the pages of this book with acute interest, admiring the precision of Henry's recall—the stunning accuracy of descriptions about a place that has changed entirely and, then again, changed hardly at all.

I have (unknowingly) walked by two of Henry's childhood homes many a time; in Sweet Dreams the porches, yards, rooms, rooftops come alive with Henry's artist mother and alcoholic father, with siblings that struggled to find their own way, with episodes of generosity and scenes of terrible despair. I spent my time at Radnor High; DeWitt did, too, with peers whose last names are familiar to me. Henry walked among the ponds and water wheels and the majestic Walton Estate before it became Eastern University. I have walked there, too, plenty of times, taking photographs like the one above. The local movie theater can be found in Henry's pages, as can Eaglesmere, an outpost I have visited. Roadways and greenways and pause and hurry—it was then, it is now, and Henry brings it to vivid life.

Sweet Dreams is a coming-of-age book. It is a book about the boy who grew up with candy wealth, fell in love with a toy printing press, and decided, early on, to be a Writer. One can decide to be a Writer, but the world, in some ways, has to stand equal to that dream. It's a contest of wills, or it can be seen as one, and DeWitt takes us through the bruises and glories. He dreams out loud. We're there.

Here he is talking about the aforementioned Walton Estate (Walmarthon), now the heart of the Eastern University campus:

... Walton's was ten minutes or so away—you waded and pushed through overgrown bushes, ferns, and low hanging branches, with dankness, cobwebs, and with shade from the branches interlocking and arching above, while woodpeckers hammered, echoing, and cicadas whirred. You'd come out, then, following a creek, above the smaller of two ponds, set in the estate's open expanse of lawn, gardens, driveways and walks. A big white house, lived in, was to the left, far off were the gatehouse and wall, and far to your right, the castle-like mansion, deserted now.

 

 

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I'm not quite sure who this lovely lady is—Dionysus, I'm guessing—but I found her standing tall within a Philadelphia street festival, utterly and peaceably alone above the crowds (she was stilts-assisted). I return to her on this rainy morning because I feel her mood. Because I have looked out upon my pile of unread books and determined my short-term future.

Having just left Cleopatra (Stacy Schiff) in her tragic, epic Alexandria, I turn toward next titles. Some of them I've read before and will be re-reading. Some are brand-new both to the world and to me. Some are written by friends or friends of friends, one by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once surprised me with a glorious response to my Chicago Tribune review of her March, some by people I doubt I'll ever meet; two were gifts. I feel decadent, to be honest, to have found this time to read. But I have it; I'm claiming it; it will be forever mine.

My au courant (can I use that term this way?) book list, then:

Sweet Dreams, DeWitt Henry
When We Danced on Water, Evan Fallenberg (a Kindle book—about dance! about Berlin! Becca recommended!)
Dreamland Social Club, Tara Altebrando
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
The Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness, Cyrus Samii
The Boneshaker, Kate Milford

Stay tuned for my responses.

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