Jesse's Ghost
Frank Bergon
Heyday, 2011, $20

Longtime Vassar professor Bergon pulls no punches with this gritty tale set in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His working-class antihero, a two-fisted brawler with a tortured conscience, narrates “the story of how I came to kill my best friend” with a hardscrabble eloquence that recalls John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. Reading 9/9 at 7:30pm, Oblong Books, Rhinebeck.


Rejoice in My Gladness: The Life of Tahirih
Janet Ruhe-Schoen
Baha’i Publishing, 2001, $18

In 1848, the same summer that suffragists gathered in Seneca Falls, an Iranian poet named Táhirih (“the Pure One”) entered a tent full of men with her face unveiled, provoking howls of outrage, death threats, and an onlooker’s suicide. Beacon author Ruhe-Schoen revisits this feminist martyr in prose that sings and soars. Reading 9/15 at 2pm, Howland Public Library, Beacon



My Reach
Susan Fox Rogers
Cornell University Press, 2011, $21

A kayaker has an especially intimate relationship with her surroundings, and Tivoli resident Rogers is a peerless observer of life on the Hudson, including her own. Like the craft she favors, her graceful memoir seems to glide effortlessly yet constantly dips below the surface, moving fluidly from the sound of katydids and the tidal habits of spatterdock to revelations of loss and love. Reading at 9/23 at 7:30pm, Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck.