Books
Listen to Me: Writing Life into Meaning
WW Norton
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A guide to charting your inner landscape through personal writing.
Why write out of our lives? What can it do for us? How can sharing our stories connect us with others?
Based on Lauber’s popular personal writing workshop series, each chapter includes inventive writing exercises and prompts, practical devices for moving past writer’s blocks and self-censorship, and advice from Lauber’s students as well as renowned authors. Listen to Me expands on the wisdom of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, offering techniques and anecdotes in combination with honest and personal experience-sharing.
White Girls
WW Norton
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Growing up in a small, racially segregated Ohio town provides the background and characters for the author’s collection of sixteen stories about love and self-discovery experienced on both sides of the tracks.
“In this striking first collection of short fiction, Lauber tells essentially two stories in 17–first that of secretive, sassy Loretta Dardio’s growing up in Union, a “speck in the northwestern corner of Ohio,” and then that of her love affair with a black boy from the other side of town. …The omniscient narrator of the last few stories is as expertly presented as the bumbling adolescent rebel voice of the earlier ones. Her masterly variations on a theme of love tolerated, withheld, won and lost command us to believe in Union, a bona fide “dull spot” of universal interest.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“Compelling. . . Takes us clearly into the heart of rambunctious sexuality [in a] standard American small town. Across its corners creep the influential shadows of that classic Ohio village, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg.”
– New York Times Book Review
“A fine collection. . . . moving and impossible to regret.”
– The New Yorker
21 Sugar Street
WW Norton
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The interweaving of voices marks a study of life in small-town America, where colorless, prejudiced lives can be affected by love, as the story of Loretta and Luther, an interracial couple who first appeared in White Girls, continues.
“A memorable tale of two small-town Ohio families, one black and one white…A wholly satisfying effort with beautifully limned characters and an energetic conclusion that brings everyone full circle.” — Starred review, Publisher’s Weekly
“What Spike Lee failed to do in Jungle Fever, what Mira Nair nearly did in Mississippi Masala, Lynn Lauber accomplishes: she tells a wholly convincing story of interracial love and healing.”– Entertainment Weekly
Selected Essays
Modern Love, The New York Times, “When One of Me Suddenly Became Three”
https://nyti.ms/2AcJftx
Bookend, The New York Times, “Confessions of an Abridger”
http://nyti.ms/1rt9Xoi
Relative Choice, The New York Times, “Reunion”
http://nyti.ms/lu4dniq
Connections Magazine, Boston Globe, “My Years Abridging Sue Grafton”
https://bit.ly/2TshCWl