My research has turned up the fact that a number of paintings are of Rhode Islanders from past centuries. One striking example is an oil portrait of Christiana Carteaux Bannister painted by her husband, Edward Mitchell Bannister, in 1860. Carteaux Bannister was an abolitionist and a successful businesswoman who was part African-American and part Narragansett Indian.
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Noted back-country climber David Oates is perhaps best known for Paradise Wild, his manifesto on the way humans fit into the natural world. In that book and in The Mountains of Paris, a recurring theme is his upbringing in a conservative religious household (“I am the gay son they never wanted”).
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What makes this memoir special to some reviewers is that it is a creative nonfiction memoir that involves two women. In it, the narrator recounts her infatuation as a graduate student with an unnamed woman she meets at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the Dream House is a phantasmagoria of Machado’s feelings about an abusive relationship with a charming, unstable, upper-class woman years after it ended.
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HOW WE FIGHT for Our Lives is a deeply compelling and personal memoir about growing up black and gay in a world where being either can be challenging, and the combination can be deadly.
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Another important moment in the book comes in a coda that ties up many loose strings, even as it leaves a big one dangling in the form of a last-minute character who hasn’t been present but who seems, in retrospect, to have haunted the story unseen. Just what this character has been up to all this time is a question you may raise upon completing this wonderfully complex novel.
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SET in Communist-era Poland in 1980, Tomasz Jedrowski’s first novel, Swimming in the Dark, is a compelling and tragic story in which two young men fall passionately in love.
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IN 1977, the year in which Carolina De Robertis’ novel, Cantoras, opens, Cabo Polonio was a remote fishing village, a rocky yet serene outcropping on the coast of Uruguay. When the novel begins, its five main characters—Romina, Flaca, Paz, Malena, and Anita a.k.a. La Venus—arrive at the village late at night, having endured a five-hour-long bus ride … They are cantoras, which we learn is a slang term for queer women.
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ON MAY 25, 1959, Joseph Caldwell was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn on his way to his tenement apartment in lower Manhattan. So begins his memoir In the Shadow of the Bridge.
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JAMIE ANDERSON’S An Army of Lovers is a pre-digested compilation of material that would be hard to find in any other single place.
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JEANETTE WINTERSON’S latest novel raises two basic questions: What does it mean to be human? And what are the limits of reaching for immortality?
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