When my sister and brother and I were growing up on Staten Island, Dad told us very little about his Vermont boyhood, and nothing at all about his father. We respected his silence. We figured he had good reason for it. But long after Dad's death, my sister and I started to look more closely at our family history. Soon we were connected to a world of New England striving and struggle that we came to see as part of our own Vermont heritage. So this is the story of Dad and his mother and brother, and his unreliable father, and his father's five sisters, whom we'd known nothing about before we began our research. It pays tribute to an everyday heroine, Dad's mother, who took her sons to Staten Island to begin a new life when her marriage failed. It also traces earlier Wrights (and forebears with other surnames, like Little, Bailey, Hadley, Hathaway, Shattuck, Blanchard, and Burt) in towns all over Vermont (and New Hampshire and Massachusetts), some of them with their own compelling stories -- farmers, soldiers, railroad men, miners, housewives, and keepers of inns and hotels. These are my Wrights of Vermont.

My earlier book, The Wrights of Vermont (Wheatmark, 2013), reported the search I began about ten years ago for my father's Vermont forebears. I had learned a lot, especially about my grandmother's heroic efforts to save her shaky marriage. Eventually she left Vermont to begin a new life on Staten Island for herself and her two sons, Dad and Uncle Ray. This book shows Dad and Mother starting their family on Staten Island and describes our home, our neighborhood, the boarding house where we sometimes dined, the schools we attended, the songs we sang, how we learned to think about money, work, fun, guilt, and politics, and our experience, especially mine, of illness, solitude, and books. Later chapters show our horizons expanding. They tell where we went on outings and how we spent our summers (ours at a riverside cottage near the New Jersey coast, and mine at an unusual summer camp in upstate New York), and they sketch the different world we found when we moved to Manhattan in 1941. I entered Columbia then and began to discover new realms of literature, philosophy, and music. Then at eighteen, with other young men of that time, I was swept up into military service in the U.S. Army and war in France and Germany.

What does a writer do when he has a family that includes a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, the brains behind Tony the Tiger and the Marlboro Man, a trio of gay puppeteers, the world's leading birdwatcher, 1960s hippies, a Dutch stowaway who served in an all-black regiment during the American Civil War, and a convicted murderer? He tells their stories and secrets, illuminating 150 years of American life along the way. Dan Bessie begins the journey through his family history with his great-grandfather in the cargo hold of a ship bound for New York on the storm-tossed Atlantic. What follows are stories of his grandfather's various entrepreneurial schemes (including a folding butter box business), a grandmother who was voted "New York's prettiest shop girl" (and who resisted the recruitment efforts of various city madams), and his uncle Harry's Turnabout Theater in Los Angeles (a renowned puppet theater drawing patrons as diverse as Shirley Temple, Ray Bradbury, and Albert Einstein). An extraordinary strain of creativity runs through the Bessie and Burnett clans, and Rare Birds celebrates the colorful diversity of this remarkable and accomplished family. While their choices and professions run the gamut of the American experience in the twentieth century, the history of the nation can be traced in these people's lives. Bessie's passionate birds of a feather gather to sing their unique song across decades and generations.

The Advocate is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) monthly newsmagazine. Established in 1967, it is the oldest continuing LGBT publication in the United States.

The #1 New York Times bestseller! “Witty, wise, and tender. It's a marvel.” —Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and A Slow Fire Burning “To say I love this book is an understatement. It’s a deep psychological mystery about the power of motherhood, the intensity of teenage love, and the danger of perfection. It moved me to tears.” —Reese Witherspoon From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts comes a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. Named a Best Book of the Year by: People, The Washington Post, Bustle, Esquire, Southern Living, The Daily Beast, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Audible, Goodreads, Library Reads, Book of the Month, Paste, Kirkus Reviews, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and many more... Perfect for book clubs! Visit celesteng.com for discussion guides and more.

Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book “was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American.” From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."