Maxine Kumin, who died last year at 88, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist and children’s book author who served as U.S. poet laureate and bred horses on her New Hampshire farm. Kumin’s memoir, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, comprises five essays, four of which first appeared in American Scholar and Georgia Review. These charming recollections will now reach a wider readership in book form.

As the title signals, Kumin’s father was a pawnbroker, and her mother was a music teacher. The family was Jewish, but lived in the largely Protestant Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. To add to the odd-man-out scenario, young Maxine attended Catholic grammar school. When she left home for college at Radcliffe, her “parochial Jewishness fell away.”

On a blind date in the final days of World War II, she met Victor Kumin, a young engineer who was working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After some wartime separation and a few hard-to-arrange trips to the Southwest, the couple began a long, enduring marriage. After early years in Boston, they moved to their rural retreat, which Kumin named Pobiz Farm in a wry reference to the “poetry business” that was occupying her time.

Within this skeletal framework of a life, Kumin writes luminously about the everyday episodes that often found their way into her poems. The Pawnbroker’s Daughter has a comfortable rhythm, a feeling that one is sitting and hearing these quotidian details firsthand from the late-in-life Kumin, perhaps while foraging for mushrooms alongside her in the woods or by the fire on a winter’s day. Heartening rather than elegiac, this endearing volume is a lovely last expression of a formidable writer’s art.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, December 2014

When Meghan Daum published her first collection in 2001—the brilliant My Misspent Youth—her fresh, honest musings as a Manhattan 20-something immediately made her the envy of a generation of aspiring writers.

Now Daum is approaching middle age, but her voice is as singular and her insights as poignant as ever. A married newspaper columnist in Los Angeles, Daum deals with aging parents, health scares and her decision to remain child-free in a baby-obsessed world.

Right out of the gate, it’s easy to see why this collection of essays is called The Unspeakable. Daum starts off with the searing “Matricide,” in which she recalls her fraught relationship with her now-​deceased mother, a woman she calls a “flashy, imperious, hyperbolic theater person” with a “phoniness that I was allergic to on every level.” Unspeakable, indeed. And yet . . . who can say they’ve never been annoyed with their mom? The rest of us just don’t have the ability to say it quite as potently and incisively as Daum.

Reflections on love and death are woven throughout the essays. In the melancholy “Not What it Used to Be,” Daum writes wistfully of being her Older Self looking back on her Younger Self, “someone who took multiple forms, who could go in any direction, who might be a bartender or a guitar player or a lesbian or a modern dancer or an office temp on Sixth Avenue.”

In the bittersweet “Difference Maker,” Daum examines her decision not to have children, how she and her husband struggle to ignore an amorphous Central Sadness in their relationship and find satisfaction in their “life of dog hikes and quiet dinners and friends coming over on the weekends.”

Daum draws out larger truths about life whether she’s writing about Joni Mitchell, foodies or dogs. The Unspeakable is a stunner of a book about settling into one’s skin.

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, October 2014

Let me confess: I’m a medical book junkie. That said, Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories is my new favorite, both in terms of literary merit and intriguing medical details and drama.

Holt is uniquely qualified, having earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English before turning to the study of medicine. Early on, he decided he wanted to write about the process of becoming a doctor. He eventually concluded that the best way to capture the essence of his journey without violating patient confidentiality was to write a series of “parables” that drew on his own experiences.

Whether or not you classify this collection of nine stories as nonfiction, they ring true in both details and spirit, starting with a doctor’s evolution from the first night on call as an intern and ending with ethical questions that a physician ponders 40 months later, his residency complete.

Holt describes telling a young woman that her death was imminent: “I’d like to say that I held her, or said soothing words. But I don’t hold female patients, even when they cry, and I had no soothing words. I knelt there and I watched her, and struggled to comprehend what I saw.”

Each account is equally compelling and thought-provoking. The narrator faces a dying woman who needs oxygen but finds the mask claustrophobic; an artist whose mouth and jaw have been eaten away by cancer; a mental patient whose mysterious but horrifying self-inflicted pain needs to be identified; and a young woman who arrives in the ER but has already, as it turns out, begun the act of suicide.

How can a doctor help patients such as these? What should or shouldn’t a physician do? How do doctors feel when confronted with such daily dilemmas and myriad personalities?

Dr. Holt never settles for easy answers, and the questions he poses—reflecting the frequent uncertainties of doctors and patients alike—will leave readers thinking long after the final page is turned.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Treasured by many readers for her 22 (and counting) mystery novels featuring the Venetian policeman Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon is also a practiced writer of sharply observed commentary about a range of subjects. My Venice and Other Essays collects some of these short and incisive pieces for the first time.

An American who has lived in Venice for 30 years, Leon straddles these two disparate cultures with a dexterous balance of affection and acerbity only afforded the perceptive expatriate. Leon clearly loves her adopted city, but she is not so pie-eyed as to overlook—and report to often hilarious effect—its idiosyncratic imperfections: dealing with a snail-like bureaucracy as her ancient flat crumbles, witnessing all manner of detritus furtively dumped into canals, enduring an aged, inconsiderate neighbor’s blaring television (and plotting how to kill off said irritant in one of her crime novels). Retreating to a house in the country, she encounters all sorts of singularly Italian critters—human and otherwise—including an attentive chicken, a wayward cat and a not particularly intelligent mole.

Moving beyond Italy, Leon is often less tolerant, but no less mordant, in her assessments of the U.S., particularly its foreign policy, militarism (something she witnesses up close as a teacher at a military base), and consumerism. Yet, there are endearing portraits of the somewhat eccentric members of her American family and a sprinkling of sweet childhood memories to soften her mounting discomfort with her native land. She also offers a scathing appraisal of Saudi Arabia, where she taught at one time.

An unabashed opera lover, Leon includes a handful of snappy pieces on the pursuit of that art form. She closes the collection with some thoughts on writing—including Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel (“I refuse to call it ‘literature,’” she writes self-deprecatingly). One particularly arresting piece contrasts the life and death of Princess Diana to the fate of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.

My Venice and Other Essays might fail to register on the radar of those unfamiliar with Leon’s fiction, which would be a pity. Savoring these short and engaging pieces is akin to sharing a latte at a Venetian café with an entertaining, opinionated, intelligent friend.

Perhaps you love Ann Patchett’s novels, like State of Wonder and Bel Canto. Truth & Beauty, her standout memoir about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, might have a special spot on your shelf. Or maybe you heard how she co-founded Parnassus, an indie bookstore in Nashville that opened its doors after two other local bookstores closed. She’s something of an all-star, and however you arrived at Patchett fandom, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage has something for you.

Fans of Patchett’s fiction will be fascinated by her views on writing nonfiction, which she says is a great way for a novelist to make a living—much better than waiting tables or teaching college kids. She’d much prefer to “knock off an essay” than do the grueling work of “facing down” the next chapter of her novel-in-progress. And as the book shows, Patchett has knocked off quite a few essays over the years, about experiences ranging from driving an RV across the American West (“My Road to Hell Was Paved”) to the title story’s tale of how she fell in love with her husband, by way of an ill-fated first marriage and her subsequent rejection of the very idea of matrimony.

This collection gathers writing across 20 years of Patchett’s life and lets readers in on her best personal stories. Did you know, for instance, that she once seriously trained to enter the L.A. Police Academy? That she considers her grandmother to be one of the great loves of her life? That she still has relationships with some of the nuns who taught her in grammar school? These stories and more are told in simple, appealing prose that feels like a phone conversation with a good friend.

And the book is a great read. Essays are artfully selected and arranged—certain pieces read back-to-back provide a fuller, more interesting story than one would alone. Patchett tells us that early in life she knew she had “a knack for content” when it came to writing. This collection is evidence of that knack, across many different contexts and over many years. It will be a welcome addition to many bookshelves, including my own.

What seems to be there, but isn’t?

As Dr. Oliver Sacks explains in Hallucinations, his latest collection of absorbing essays, “Hallucinations, beyond any other waking experience, can excite, bewilder, terrify, or inspire, leading to folklore and the myths (sublime, horrible, creative, and playful) which perhaps no individual and no culture can wholly dispense with.”

Hallucinations, which differ starkly from dreams and imagination, are often associated with wild visions induced by fever, madness or drugs. They come in much greater variety, however, and include hearing voices, music or noises, feeling things or smelling odors—none of which exist. This multitude of illusions has a grand litany of causes, including injury, illness, migraines, trauma, epilepsy and more.

As always, Sacks, the best-selling author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a fascinating cast of patients, starting with a blind, elderly woman named Rosalie, who suddenly began seeing a parade of people in colorful “Eastern” dress and animals, and later a group of somber men in dark suits, and finally, crowds of tiny people and children climbing up the sides of her wheelchair. These crowded, complex visions rolled before Rosalie’s unseeing eyes like a movie, sometimes amusing, and at other times boring or frightening. Sacks diagnosed Rosalie with a fairly rare condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which causes visually impaired people to hallucinate.

In addition to Rosalie, he shares stories about a patient who keeps hearing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” play repeatedly, a Parkinson’s patient who watches a group of women trying on fur coats in her doctor’s waiting room, a man who feels peach-like fuzz covering everything he touches and a narcolepsy patient who sees the road rise and hit her in the face as she drives. Hallucinations, we learn, can range from terrifying to inspirational, from annoying to entertaining. One of Sacks’ elderly patients greatly looked forward to her visit each evening from “a gentleman visitor from out of town.”

In these 15 essays, Sacks clearly explains and categorizes an amazing assortment of hallucinations, trying to make sense of phenomena that seem to defy logic. He shares his own tale of a voice he heard when alone on a mountain and suffering from a dislocated knee. Just when he was tempted to lie down and sleep, a voice commanded, “You can’t rest here—you can’t rest anywhere. You’ve got to go on. Find a pace you can keep up and go on steadily.”

No doubt his many avid readers are deeply grateful that the good doctor followed the orders of this life-saving hallucination.

Much like John Updike’s elegant novels, Jonathan Franzen’s fiction paints a rich portrait of middle America as it copes with its failures, its hidden dreams and its ruptures. While Updike’s doughy men and women live their lives locked in a struggle between faith and doubt, Franzen’s characters suffer through boredom and restlessness. And just as Updike’s stylish essays range widely and smartly over a broad range of topics from golf and art to philosophy and religion, Franzen’s graceful essays range widely over topics from ecology and the origins of the novel to theater and ornithology. In Farther Away, his new collection of essays (most of them written over the past five years), Franzen discusses topics as diverse as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Alice Munro’s exceptional fiction (and the reasons it excels in comparison to most literary fiction) and . . . hornets.

The fullest bodied of the essays show Franzen engaging passionately with texts, people and birds. Woven through the essays, and the focus of at least two of them, are Franzen’s attempts to come to terms with the loss of his good friend, David Foster Wallace. Reflecting on Wallace and the late novelist’s engagement with writing and the world, Franzen observes, “At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloging of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.” Wallace’s death brings Franzen out of himself, as does his own commitment to environmentalism.

In the past, Franzen’s arrogance has masked his real passion for good writing and has limited his ability to express his deep appreciation for writing that makes a difference, but in these essays he unveils his appreciations. On Randall Jarrell’s introduction to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Women, Franzen reminds us that we “can read Jarrell’s introduction and be reminded of what outstanding literary criticism used to look like: passionate, personal, fair-minded, thorough, and intended for ordinary readers.” With great force and affection he reminds us that James Purdy “continues to be one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America.”

Even though he etches many of them out of pain and loss, the essays in Farther Away offer delightful, poignant, sometimes humorous glimpses of a writer not only struggling to capture a moment in just the right words but also falteringly embracing his humanity.

Like the harrowing tales of swashbuckling pirates and square-jawed detectives in vintage pulp magazines, each beautifully crafted essay in John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection Pulphead is a self-contained world. But where the hodgepodge content of a pulp rag leaps from one escapist fantasy to another, Sullivan's masterful essays invite an honest confrontation with reality, especially when considered in light of one another. By highlighting features of American life as diverse as a Christian rock festival in Pennsylvania, ancient caves and their modern-day explorers in Mississippi, the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the King of Pop, Pulphead compels its readers to consider each as an equal sum in the bizarre arithmetic of American identity.

Much of Sullivan’s magazine work for GQ, Harper's and the Paris Review has found its way into this collection, which is fine because the genius of these essays comes from reading them as constituents of Pulphead's patchwork narrative, not in isolation. After skimming the table of contents, you're not quite sure how, or whether, a somber reflection on the state of the Gulf Coast after Katrina will segue successfully into a meditation on the cult of reality television. But it works somehow, and more often than not it works eerily well; that you'll likely find it easy to supply such transitions for yourself, with only a gentle nudge from Sullivan, is a testament to how extraordinarily nimble his writing is.

This sensitivity is most clearly on display in the portraits Sullivan paints of the people who populate his essays. The characters he encounters in his tour of Americana often take on three-dimensional depth with only minimal description. Sullivan can also be devastatingly funny. His account of hauling a 29-foot RV up a steep hill with the help of five West Virginian woodsmen rings with as much absurdity and wit as anything the giants of New Journalism ever put to paper.

It’s hardly a coincidence, then, that Sullivan begins Pulphead by quoting Norman Mailer. In his resignation letter from Esquire magazine in 1960, Mailer writes, “Good-by now, rum friends, and best wishes. You got a good mag (like the pulp-heads say). . . .” Interesting that Sullivan excludes the second half of the quotation, in which Mailer warns Esquire’s editorial board, “you print nice stuff, but you gotta treat the hot writer right or you lose him like you just lost me.”

Omitting Mailer’s punch line is likely Sullivan’s attempt at humility, but make no mistake, he’s as red-hot a writer as they come.