Bøger af Michele Herman

In Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes, poet and novelist Michele Herman explores a variety of timeless human predicaments - adolescent lust, overprotective parents, dementia, gender confusion and more - by imagining her way into the actual lives of eight familiar nursery-rhyme characters. Many authors have taken fictional or mythological characters and brought them into our contemporary world, but these eight story-poems accomplish something more unusual by roaming around in Mr. and Mrs. Sprat's house to find out what ails them, following little Bo Beep out to the Welsh pasture to learn how she lost track of her sheep, conjuring up a twin brother for Little Miss Muffet, and much more.

This collection could be called The Lives of Girls and Women if Alice Munro hadn't already taken the title. In funny, lyrical, poignant poems and prose poems, Herman conjures everyone from lonely teenage girls listening to records in their bedrooms to her own Depression-era seamstress mother to Betty Boop to the oldest daughter of the old woman who lives in a shoe.

Life hasn't turned out quite the way Becca Cammeyer of Greenwich Village--once voted most likely to land on Broadway or in jail for a good cause--had planned. Her only child has moved to another continent, she's still living in a fifth-floor walkup with her aging dog, still single, still nearly broke, still not on speaking terms with her best friend or her mother, and still hearing the ghost of her long-dead father whispering in her ear. But she's a semi-famous tour guide, and on a perfect October evening, Becca almost believes all is well with her world as she helps a group of South Carolina tourists fall in love with her beloved Village. The tour concludes, and Becca sends the women on their way, unaware that her world is about to be upended. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Becca must come to terms with her own paralysis, her survivor's guilt, and the messiness of her life. She embarks on wildly improbable reconciliations and new relationships. At once a love story to Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world, Save the Village reveals how when a community comes together, everyone wins.