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Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

In her memoir YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work and patriarchy.

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Week of June 3, 2024

Paperback releases for the week of June 3rd include CROOK MANIFESTO, a powerful and hugely entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory and continues Colson Whitehead's Harlem saga that began with HARLEM SHUFFLE; FLAGS ON THE BAYOU, James Lee Burke's Edgar Award-winning novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana as the South transforms, and a brilliant cast of characters are caught in the maelstrom; GOOD NIGHT, IRENE by Luis Alberto Urrea, an exhilarating World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary young woman’s heroic frontline service in the Red Cross; THE FIRST LADIES, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray's enlightening novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune; and MOTHERHOOD SO WHITE, an honest, vulnerable and uplifting memoir in which Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman.

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