The Literate Quilter

Books. Quilts. What I Love.

  • A Far-Flung Life by M. L. Stedman

    When you think about it, everyone’s life’s a prison–of days, sort of. The trick is to get comfortable in it, I reckon. Find you’re freedom inside whatever your prison is. from A Far-Flung Life

    “I reckon there should be a word. ‘Forgetment,’say. A ‘forgetment’ is the opposite of a memory.” Andy pegged it. His family had foregetment, but what he didn’t know is why they actively have forgotten the past. He didn’t know the pain and secret guilt just below the surface. It had taken his mother from him when he was a baby, and it was where his uncle Matt retreated at times, and it was in his grandmother’s silences. Whenever Andy asked questions about his mother and who his father was, he only encountered that forgetment.

    The McBride family had a lot to forget. The automobile accident that took Phil McBride and the eldest son left Matt with a head injury that temporarily altered him. Lorna and daughter Rosie had to pick up the pieces while Matt recovered. A man spent a season at the station, his clean, handsome looks turning Rosie’s head. Then Rosie left for the city, retuning with a baby, but to silence her secret, she chose a tragic death.

    This heartbreaker of a novel begins in 1958 in a remote town in Eastern Australia where the McBrides run a sheep station. It is a hard life in a hard land, and only the strongest can thrive. The McBrides are supported by a roving ‘roo killer, Pete, who has his own sorrows: he was a tortured POW who lost his family over his own secrets. Later, a woman geologist comes testing land for asbestos mining, the first woman to connect with Matt, forcing him to come to a reckoning with his past.

    It’s a story like Job’s, or something out of Shakespeare, with one loss following after another, Andy the only reason Matt can go on. The melodrama is thick, but the writing is so suburb I had to read on. And in the end, there is grace.

    Thanks to Scribner for a free book.

    A Far-Flung Life
    by M.L. Stedman
    Scribner
    Published March 3, 2026
    ISBN: 9781668219614 (ISBN10: 1668219611)

    from the publisher

    Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered.

    Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.

    Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.

    Capturing a family, a community, A Far-Flung Life tells of the many ways humans can do each other wrong and how we move on when things can’t be put right. With shimmering prose and a delicious wit, the mysteries of being human are laid bare in this hopeful meditation on time and resilience and the lengths we go to to protect what we love.

  • Books, Quilts, News

    I have two weeks of book mail to catch up with!

    • The Best Short Stories 2025
    • Under Water by Tara Menon
    • A Voice Like Mine by Deb Haaland
    • Little Wild by Laura Evans

    New on my NetGalley shelf are

    • The Animal Room by Lauren Acampora. My bookish friend Eylse recommended it.
    • In the Blood: Poems by Carl Phillips. I have enjoyed his novels.

    A new quilt group friend gifted me a dozen vintage handkerchiefs!

    Our son’s gaming friend Roger gifted him this cute portrait of Ellie and Nyx! So talented!

    We hung new quilts in the library, all but the last made by Sunetra Humbad.

    by Sunetra Humbad
    by Sunetra Humbad
    featuring hand beading. by Sunetra Humbad
    pattern is the Fiona Quilt Block, published by Schiffer Craft. by Sunetra Humbad
    Cathedral Windows, hand sewn and beaded. by Sunetra Humbad

    My Alice in Wonderland quilt, hand embroidered, machine quilted. I got the pattern decades ago free from Mirkwood Studios.

    We have had wild weather here in SE Michigan! One day we walk without a jacket, a few days later we are bundled up against the chill, then its warm again, then horrible winds that blew down branches and fences. I guess March can’t decide if its coming in like a lion or a lamb.

    We have been rearranging our house. We gave away a solid wood 1960s desk which we got free. The young couple are thrilled to have a quality piece. In its place is the circa 1920s-30s spinet desk Mom bought in the 1970s. The spinet desk is being replaced with a bench/shoe storage piece for near the entryway.

    I read. Work on quilts. Walk the dog. Organize the house. Anything to keep my mind off the insanity being released in the world. A crazy war, a mad president and cabinet. Antisemitism, with a local temple and school building struck by a car, causing a fire.

    A robin is perched in the small tree outside my office window as I write this. It reminds me of renewal, rebirth, the cycle. May humankind transform as well. We have descended into madness before and recovered. I am confident we will throw off this darkness once again.

    Stay Safe.

    Find your bliss.

  • Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories

    The earliest of them, in particular, introduce us to an irreverent young comic writer trying his hand at different genres, with the sole aim of entertaining his readers. from Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories, Introduction by Rosamund Bartlett

    Volunteers from across the world collaborated to translate Anton Chekhov’s earliest works which were written for the magazine market while he was a medical student. They are entertaining reading full of humor and satire.

    The forms of the stories are diverse. “Holiday Assignments” purposes to be student essays. “Comic Advertisements and Notices” includes book titles at a local shop. including Teach Yourself Passionate Love, or, Oh, You Brute! by Idiotov and Dictionary of all the indecent words used around the world. There are math tests with questions such as “My mother-in-law is 75, but my wife is 42. What time is it?” There is an Almanac. Some stories read like folk tales. As Antosha Chekhonte he shares a collection of “Philosophical Definitions of Life” including “Our life is like a typesetter’s drawer filled with punctuation marks. (Confucius).”

    “The Artist’s Wives” tells of a writer and his self-centered pursuit, demeaning his unfortunate wife who is only valued as an unpaid copyist. Other artists in the boarding house are just as bad, abusing their suffering wives. The story ends by warning female readers from becoming involved with artists.

    Some stories have a bite to them. In “The Wolf Baiting”, a child is brought to see the so-called sport for the wolves killed before they can harm the dogs meant to attack him. What is the purpose of this sport? Is it for entrainment, or betting and takings? Chekhov ends with, “One can offset all the costs with the takings, but it is impossible to offset the small injuries this bating may have inflicted on the young should of the aforementioned schoolboy.”

    In “The Mistress” a wealthy woman forces her coachman to serve her sexually, ruining his marriage. “Are you even human,” the mistresses explodes while impelling a servant to force the coachman to return to work.

    Rosamund Bartlett’s Introduction offers a wonderful overview of Chekhov’s works and background to the stories and their publication.

    A delightful collection of tales.

    Thanks to Cherry Orchard Books for a free book.

    Anton Chekhov. Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880–1882
    by Anton Chekhov; Rosamund Bartlett (editor), Elena Michajlowska (editor)
    Cherry Orchard Books
    Hardcover Published November 4, 2025
    ISBN: 9798887198088
    Paperback Published November 4, 2025
    ISBN: 9798887198095
    Kindle Edition Pub Date March 24, 2026
    ISBN: 9798887198118

    from the publisher
    This volume presents the first comprehensive annotated edition of Chekhov’s earliest stories in English. Translated as part of a unique project involving 85 volunteers from 9 countries, the 58 stories were all written between 1880 and 1882, when Chekhov was in his early twenties, and still at medical school. They make up volume 1 of the 10 volumes of short stories in the authoritative thirty-volume Academy of Sciences edition of Chekhov’s Complete Collected Works, and have been arranged in chronological order. Ranging from comic tales, hilarious skits, literary parodies, outrageous pot-boilers and poignant novellas, the stories are all aimed at a wide audience, and offer a revealing window into the unknown early chapter of Chekhov’s life and literary career.

  • The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, ed. Alice Hoffman

    Reader, I adopted him.

    from Alvin by Jodi Picoult in The Best Dog in the World

    I have known eight dogs who meant the world to me. My first companion came to me when I was five years old. Pepper followed me to school one day and appeared at my classroom door. She laid her chin in the crook of my back as I watched tv or colored. I loved her soft floppy ears.

    As an adult, my husband and I had successively two black and tan male dachshunds. Pippin was high spirited and went on vacations with us. PJ was bossy and demanded a hour of fetch every day. Our son’s first word was the dog’s name.

    Then for sixteen years our first Shiba Inu, Kili, was the heart of our family, the dog our son grew up with. Friendly, beautiful, intelligent, a real chick magnet when our son walked her. When he went off to college, she jumped into the car hoping to go with him.

    After her came more Shibas. There was Suki, a puppy mill breeder who had never been socialized with people or dogs. She was the smartest dog we ever had and understood things like “lets go right”. We got her a companion, Kara, who had been a breeder in a puppy mill for nine years. Friendly and loveable, he taught Kili how to cuddle and play chase. Sadly, he had kidney failure and was gone a year later. Suki was devastated with his loss so we brought home another puppy mill breeder, Kamikaze, a brash, bossy and spirited girl. She and Suki grew old together. And last year we brought home Tessa whose owner had died. She spent three months in a local shelter. She avoids being touched so people passed her by. Tessa loves walks and playing chase and sleeps at my feet. She is no longer fearful of hands, but avoids being touched still.

    The Best Dog in the World is a heartwarming series of essays on how dogs changed each writer’s life, even the difficult dogs, the problem dogs, the ugly dogs, as well as the gorgeous dogs and those who brought comfort and healing.

    Alice Hoffman writes that when growing up, “I had long ago realized that the member of my family I was closest to was my dog.” As an adult, her Houdini ‘trained himself’ while Hoffman was busy with jobs and school.

    Emily Henry’s Dottie was the saddest specimen in the shelter, unloved and scared and likely soon to die if not adopted. It took her months to learn to trust. Bonnie Garmus rescued a greyhound who understood when people or animals needed comforting. Tova Mirvis brought home Sunny during the pandemic and is a comfort as the growing children leave home. Roxane Gay’s animal loving wife convinced her they needed a dog and over time realized they were obsessed with each other.

    Adriana Trigiani’s daughter knew that Lola chose her knowing they were the lucky ones. Jodi Picoult’s rescue was “the dog equivalent of Napoleon”, small but imperious. Isabel Allende ‘s dog saw ghosts. Chris Bohjalian writes, “I’ve made three incontrovertibly wise decisions in my life: Marrying that woman. Becoming a parent. And listening to my wife when she said we were getting a dog.”

    The truth is that we love our dogs not just for who they are, but sometimes in spite of it. Not all dogs are angels. from Alvin by Jodi Picoult

    Laura Zigman’s son wanted a sibling but got a dog. He knew “That’s my dog” upon first sight. Veterinarian Nick Trout tells of the heartbreak of a failed surgery on a dog. Amy Tan’s love of Yorkies took her into the world of show dogs. Elizabeth Strout and her husband had his dog’s name engraved inside their wedding bands.

    Ann Leary discovered her brilliant dog was half Australian cattle dog who needed lots of stimulation and play. Peter Yoon’s first dog was “an animal that allowed me to explore and navigate all the landscapes outside the small tidy box I had created around myself.”

    Hoffman notes these essays are about loss, family, new relationships and hardships, but also about love. Dog lovers, this book is for you.

    Thanks to Scribner for a free book through NetGalley.

    The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love
    by Alice Hoffman
    Scribner
    Pub Date March 10, 2026
    ISBN 9781668209028

    from the publisher

    Fourteen beloved authors celebrate the life-changing bond with their canine companions in this heartwarming essay collection edited by New York Times bestselling author and lifelong dog lover Alice Hoffman.

    Anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to share their life with a dog knows the experience is both profound and transformative. Here, in this charming collection of essays, fifteen celebrated authors share unforgettable tales of the dogs who left their pawprints on their hearts.

    With contributions from Isabel Allende, Chris Bohjalian, Bonnie Garmus, Roxane Gay, Emily Henry, Ann Leary, Tova Mirvis, Jodi Picoult, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, Adriana Trigiani, Nick Trout, Paul Yoon, and Laura Zigman, The Best Dog in the World captures the full range of the canine-human connection, from the joy of welcoming a new puppy to the heartache of saying goodbye to a beloved friend.

    A love letter to the loyal companions who enrich our lives and teach us about empathy, joy, and unconditional love, this anthology is the perfect gift for dog lovers everywhere, offering a blend of laughter, tears, and inspiration that will resonate with anyone who has been fur-ever touched by the love of a dog.