Leroy Street
by Frances Badalamenti
We fly to New York for the first time in three years.
It was exactly three years ago this summer that we had been back. And then I came back home to Portland and came apart. That was when I left the job at the college. It was also when my first book was about to be published. I wasn’t the same again.
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on books by Franck Bouysse and Lucie McKnight Hardy, an interview with Blake Sanz, and more.
In our afternoon reading: an interview with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, thoughts on Jen Fawkes’s fiction, and more.
In our morning reading: an interview with John Lurie, thoughts on Elena Ferrante’s fiction, and more.
In our morning reading: new writing by Patty Yumi Cottrell, an interview with Frances Badalamenti, and more.
In our afternoon reading: a look at the life and music of Roky Erickson, a playlist from Gregory Spatz, and more.
We’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Frances Badalamenti‘s novel I Don’t Blame You, out this week on Unsolicited Press. The publisher describes it as follows: “I Don’t Blame You is a young woman’s journey of losing her mother a mere two months before becoming a mother. It follows Ana through a year of going between her home in Portland and her mother’s home base in New Jersey as she battled cancer and as Ana grew a baby. The narrative begins with backstory around her mother’s early life being raised by a single mother in poverty in a Bronx tenement apartment and also her father’s early years in depression-era Brooklyn, both raised in challenging circumstances by Italian immigrants.”
Salad Days by Frances Badalamenti On the night that Uncle Joe’s Tavern opened for the first time ever, I was asleep in my room. I had turned ten that day. My mother had our loud Italian family over for baked ziti and cake. We had just moved from a big four-bedroom house with a sprawling yard and a two-car garage into a nondescript one-bedroom garden apartment, even though there was nothing resembling a garden. There was grass and parking areas. […]