Overview

Summer is fireflies and sparklers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon - but they're captured here, in loving sensuous prose that's both personal and universal, for you to find any time of year. Experience the most evocative tribute to the meaning of the season, a season whose magical feeling stays with us even in winter. Where does that feeling come from? What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. A crown you've made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing and sleeping with the windows open. This essay brims with a searching honesty and insight about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead. Release yourself into the sky and feel, Nina MacLaughlin writes, for a moment: there's time. If summer is the season of your life, if the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day hold your favorite memories, you'll love Summer Solstice.

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9781574232387

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Reviews

Praise for WAKE, SIREN: OVID RESUNG (FSG, 2019): Nina MacLaughlin has done something audacious. She has invited the female characters in Ovid--daughter, mother, sister, wife, widow, queen, nymph, maenad, monster, even the blind seer Tiresias--to sing through her. Wake, Siren is a stunning and sustained performance, in language bold and lyrical, direct yet sensual, and loaded with natural beauty. --Mary Norris, author of Greek to Me Vital, vivid, and angry. --Kirkus, starred review

“For those who cannot safely venture from their homes this season, MacLaughlin’s book can be that breath of fresh air, the nostalgic call back to better days, and the hope for a future when we can safely gather again under open sky... [Summer Solstice is] a brief reverie, short and sweet like the fleeting days it describes.”—Green Mountain Review “One can easily read this sensuous little book in an evening, or dawdle, as I’ve done, over the last week....It offers a vivid contrast to this moment of masks: the immediacy of a season bursting out of itself, elemental and clean.”—Joan Silverman, Portland Press Herald

Praise for Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG, 2019): Nina MacLaughlin has done something audacious. She has invited the female characters in Ovid--daughter, mother, sister, wife, widow, queen, nymph, maenad, monster, even the blind seer Tiresias--to sing through her. Wake, Siren is a stunning and sustained performance, in language bold and lyrical, direct yet sensual, and loaded with natural beauty. --Mary Norris, author of Greek to Me Vital, vivid, and angry. --Kirkus, starred review

Praise for Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG, 2019): Nina MacLaughlin has done something audacious. She has invited the female characters in Ovid-daughter, mother, sister, wife, widow, queen, nymph, maenad, monster, even the blind seer Tiresias-to sing through her. Wake, Siren is a stunning and sustained performance, in language bold and lyrical, direct yet sensual, and loaded with natural beauty. -Mary Norris, author of Greek to Me Vital, vivid, and angry. -Kirkus, starred review

Praise for Summer Solstice “For those who cannot safely venture from their homes this season, MacLaughlin’s book can be that breath of fresh air, the nostalgic call back to better days, and the hope for a future when we can safely gather again under open sky... [Summer Solstice is] a brief reverie, short and sweet like the fleeting days it describes.”—Green Mountain Review “One can easily read this sensuous little book in an evening, or dawdle, as I’ve done, over the last week....It offers a vivid contrast to this moment of masks: the immediacy of a season bursting out of itself, elemental and clean.”—Joan Silverman, Portland Press Herald Praise for Winter Solstice “Nina MacLaughlin returns to celebrate the winter solstice, and delivers a most sensual hymn and harbor for the human ability to feel our way through the darkness towards wise, unexpected connections. This ethereal collection offers us a candle at night—it’s an astonishing gift.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments “Nina MacLaughlin stands shoulder to shoulder with such writers as José Emilio Pacheco and Fleur Jaeggy. In Winter Solstice we are invited into the impending dark, guided through our own, and in the end given just enough light to survive. MacLaughlin’s meditation is both universal and uncommonly distinct. An immense joy to read, Winter Solstice is not so much an essay as it is a vision.” —Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry “Smart and lyrical—this book makes you feel alive.” —Nicholson Baker, author of The Anthologist

Author Information

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, and the companion to Summer Solstice, the forthcoming Winter Solstice. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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