Staff Picks: Broccoli Puzzles, Bot Poetry, and Banana Pudding

Emily Ruskovich.

I spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family in Hudson, New York. Among other goodies, my stocking was stuffed with books, and I squirreled Emily Ruskovich’s over to the wood-burning stove and ate through page after page as log after log went up in smoke and the iron became too hot to touch. The stove was etched with a label, but it said America to me, like did: both anesthetizing in their beauty, dangerous and commonplace. Ever since reading , I wanted more. In that piece, she writes about those rabbits like she knows the insides of their den from long personal experience. And does bring us the dear interiors of the animal world, the musky quiet and the secrecy, but Ruskovich also brings human imperfection right to the surface of the novel without the tedium of other contemporary realism. I