What's Peg Reading?
The Best American Essays 2022
The Best American Essays 2022 Edited by Alexander Chee, Series Editor Robert Atwan I have a wide bookshelf of these collections, the earliest being from 1988, when the guest editor was the remarkable Annie Dillard. My copy is heavily dog-eared. In her introduction,...
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake Tiya Miles One of NPR's best books of the year and one of Time's must-read books of 2021. In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her...
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums A. Kendra Greene I bought this book, sight unseen, early in 2020, based on the appeal of its title, and a certain constricted feeling resulting from the necessary...
Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects
Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects Neil MacGregor I bought this book in the shop at The Globe in London, part of making tangible a day when I wandered in a distracted dream from exhibit to exhibit, trying to both listen to the tour...