Newly Released Books   By AMY VIRSHUP Published: February 18, 2009 Perhaps it’s the month, but February’s list is full of novels that take love — in all its permutations — as their main subject. Most often its course doesn’t run smoothly. (What would be the plot if it did?) But a number of this month’s authors seem to hold out hope that romance will flower at last. HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET By Jamie Ford 290 pages. Ballantine Books. $24 The year is 1942, and in the wake of Pearl Harbor sentiment against Seattle’s Japanese-American population has been growing; 12-year-old Henry Lee’s parents make him wear an “I Am Chinese” button whenever he leaves their International District apartment, because they fear he will mistakenly be picked up by the police. But Henry’s closest friend, Keiko Okabe, the only other Asian student at Rainier Elementary, is of Japanese descent, though the single word of the language she knows is: wakarimasen (I don’t understand). Soon, Keiko and her family are swept up in the anti-Japanese hysteria that led to the interment of some 110,000 people in relocation camps. In the novel’s other strand, which takes place in 1968, the adult Henry tries to make sense of his past, a quest touched off by the unsealing of the Panama Hotel, where many of the departing internees had left their possessions for safe-keeping. This is Jamie Ford’s first novel. DREAM HOUSE By Valerie Laken 336 pages. Harper. $24.99 Kate Kinzler and her husband, Stuart, have been coasting — living in a rental apartment with brown shag carpeting and a water-stained ceiling: “They were 29, full grown, seven years out of college. And still living like this.” Then her parents give them the money to buy their own house. The one Kate chooses is a “project,” with an overgrown lawn, fake wood paneling and years of grime. Unbeknownst to them, it also comes with a history: a man was killed within its walls almost 20 years earlier. As Kate reclaims the house, her marriage crumbles, and she becomes involved with two men, Walker Price and Jay Harrison, who share a connection to the house and its past. NOTHING RIGHT By Antonya Nelson 296 pages. Bloomsbury. $25 Antonya Nelson doesn’t write about the lucky. In her short stories, 11 of which are collected here, teenagers become pregnant, marriages end, love goes unrequited. Her characters, most of them women, are looking for a connection, but rarely find it. In “Shauntrelle,” Constance Vorhees has broken up her marriage by having an affair, and then misread her lover’s intentions. Now she’s living with a roommate in a corporate apartment. Alone one night Constance checks her e-mail messages: “More than anything, what Constance wished was that she would open her computer and it would sparkle like a treasure chest, perched here on the windowsill of the living room. The screen would be radiant, flooding the dark apartment, and a hundred messages would await her,” Ms. Nelson writes. “But there was nothing new, not even spam.” FOOL By Christopher Moore 311 pages. William Morrow. $26.99 In his previous books Christopher Moore has done vampires (“Bloodsucking Fiends”), Jesus (“Lamb”) and whales (“Fluke”), among other things. In “Fool” he takes on Shakespeare, with a retelling of “King Lear” through the eyes of Lear’s fool, here a short, profane, sex-obsessed jester named Pocket. The plot and cast of characters are borrowed (more or less) from the original, with several Moore-ian additions — a second fool, named Drool, and a refrain that could come in handy for any adapter of Shakespeare: “There’s always a bloody ghost.” CORNER SHOP By Roopa Farooki 355 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95 When we meet them, the characters in “Corner Shop” are living in London, pursuing their dreams. Fourteen-year-old Luhith Khalil, known as Lucky, who cares more for soccer than for school, wants to win the World Cup for England. His mother, Delphine, a former marketing executive, now feels trapped as a stay-at-home mother. She’d only wanted to get away from her village in rural France. His grandfather, Zaki, runs the shop of the title in a dusty corner of Hammersmith, while longing “to live with my soul mate by my side, free from all the petty practicalities of life.” The extent to which they achieve those dreams, and then have to live with the burdens that follow, is the subject of Roopa Farooki’s second novel. CUTTING FOR STONE By Abraham Verghese 541 pages. Knopf. $26.95 Like his main character, Marion Stone, Abraham Verghese is a doctor (he teaches at the Stanford University School of Medicine) born in Ethiopia who emigrated to the United States. Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are left alone at birth when their mother, a nun, dies, and their father, a surgeon, disappears. Fleeing an act of political violence, Marion lands in New York, at a charity hospital called Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, where events transpire to force him to confront his past. Dr. Verghese has published two previous memoirs; this is his first novel. Racial Insults and Quiet Bravery in 1960s Mississippi By JANET MASLIN Published: February 18, 2009 In “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel about black domestic servants working in white Southern households in the early 1960s, one woman works especially tirelessly. She labors long into the night. She is exhausted. Her eyes are stinging, her fingers bloody and sore. Skip to next paragraph Is she ironing pleats? Scrubbing toilets? Polishing silver for an all-important meeting of the local bridge club? No way. She is Miss Skeeter Phelan, a white woman. And the white women of “The Help” don’t do those demeaning jobs. They don’t do much of anything else either. But brave, tenacious Skeeter is different. So she is slaving away on a book that will blow the lid off the suffering endured by black maids in Jackson, Miss. Skeeter’s going to call the place “Niceville,” but she won’t make it sound nice. All of Jackson’s post-sorority girls from Ole Miss will be up in arms if Skeeter’s tell-all book sees the light of day. The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. (“Law have mercy,” one says, when asked to cooperate with the book project. “I reckon I’m on do it.”) It’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions. And it celebrates noblesse oblige so readily that Skeeter’s act of daring earns her a gift from a local black church congregation. “This one, this is for the white lady,” the Reverend of that church says. “You tell her we love her, like she’s our own family.” A brief word now about Ms. Stockett: When she moved to New York City from Jackson, she came to understand how deeply ambivalent she felt about her roots. If a New Yorker told her that Jackson must be beautiful, she would say it was fraught with crime. But if a New Yorker spoke contemptuously about Jackson, Ms. Stockett would rise to its defense. “Mississippi is like my mother,” she writes in an afterword to “The Help.” And you will see, after your wrestling match with this problematic but ultimately winning novel, that when it comes to the love-hate familial bond between Ms. Stockett and her subject matter, she’s telling the truth. Expectations notwithstanding, it’s not the black maids who are done a disservice by this white writer; it’s the white folk. The two principal maid characters, the lovingly maternal Aibileen and the angry, scrappy Minny, leap off the page in all their warm, three-dimensional glory. Book groups armed with hankies will talk and talk about their quiet bravery and the outrageous insults dished out by their vain, racist employers. The worst of these bosses, a woman known as Miss Hilly, treats Minny like a thief. And she campaigns to have Jackson households install extra toilets so that colored help will not have to use white families’ restricted bathrooms. With the kind of lead-footed linkage that runs throughout this novel — even though it may accurately reflect what Ms. Stockett witnessed in her Southern girlhood — Miss Hilly’s Junior League does its fund-raising for the sake of “the Poor Starving Children of Africa” while treating the poor African-Americans of Jackson as if they were subhuman. Miss Hilly is enough of a witch for readers to wait eagerly for a house to fall on her. She makes herself the nemesis of each of the book’s black characters and many of its white ones. Sounding decades older than Skeeter even though the two were college roommates, Hilly shrieks villainously about the virtues of segregation and the rectitude of Mississippi’s politicians. News of the real world seeps into the book only occasionally, with a brief televised glimpse of James Meredith integrating Ole Miss or other muffled rendered news. “There is a skirmish in Vietnam,” Skeeter notices. “The reporter seems to think it’ll be solved without much fuss.” The tide of soapsuds rises as Skeeter comes across a copy of Jim Crow laws and is galvanized into action; as Skeeter the liberal-minded spinster begins dating the son of an intolerant local politician; as Skeeter begins wondering what happened to Constantine, the maid who lovingly raised her; and as both Aibileen and Minny become increasingly privy to the secrets of their employers’ households. Though “The Help” might well have veered off into violent repression of these maids’ outspokenness (one character is blinded for having accidentally used a whites-only bathroom), Ms. Stockett doesn’t take it there. She’s interested in the affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections. Aibileen is this book’s loveliest character, especially in scenes that have her raising Mae Mobley, the toddler now in her charge. Having endured the pain of raising white child after white child only to see them grow up and away from her, Aibileen is still ready to embrace another one. On the evidence of Ms. Stockett’s autobiographical afterword, this is the part of the story she knows best; she herself had an absentee white mother and was raised by a black woman named Demetrie. She loved Demetrie dearly without ever giving much thought to what Demetrie’s life was like, and she says that “The Help” was written to fill in that gap. Mae Mobley’s little games include pretending to stage a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter and pretending to ride the bus with Rosa Parks. Or so it goes in this ultimately soft-pedaled version of Southern women’s lives, one in which real danger is usually at a distance. At one point Skeeter hears a strange new guy, Bob Dylan, singing a strange new song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and finds herself full of optimism. Had she heard the same Bob Dylan singing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” his accusatory song about the fatal caning of a 51-year-old black barmaid by a young white patrician, “The Help” might have ventured outside its harsh yet still comfortable, reader-friendly world. Lives Defined by Hurricanes, but Devoted to New Orleans   By DWIGHT GARNER Published: February 17, 2009 Criticism, H. L. Mencken said, is “prejudice made plausible.” That’s why, reading the first 50 pages of Dan Baum’s new book about Katrina and New Orleans, I tried to puzzle out exactly what I disliked about it. I wanted my eventual pan of “Nine Lives” to make fine distinctions, to be 99.4 percent airtight.  My complaints fell into four plausibly neat categories: one, Mr. Baum’s story jumps from character to character in that facile, frustrating, crisscrossing style that’s become popular; two, he writes from the perspectives and often in the voices of his characters, reminiscent of Studs Terkel in “Working,” but Mr. Baum can ladle the emotions on too thickly, and it’s uncomfortable watching a white man channel a struggling black man’s voice (“A po-lice was tricking with some broad”); three, the core ingredients in “Nine Lives” are too similar to that of other humid, foliage-choked, cross-dresser-occupied sagas about the Deep South, especially John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”; and, four, Mr. Baum is — this will sound oxymoronic, but it’s not — one of those underwriters who overwrite. You can feel the strain of composition behind his spunky and well-formed sentences, and they distract from the stories he’s trying to tell. There. Beautiful. Review over. Time for me to go for a run. Silly me. Because at about Page 65, something very real clicks in “Nine Lives.” The small, stray, unobtrusive details that Mr. Baum has been planting along the way begin coming together and paying off, like a slot machine that’s begun to glow and vibrate. By the final third of “Nine Lives,” as the water begins pouring into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was weeping like an idiot in the coffee shop where I was reading. “Nine Lives,” which grew from Mr. Baum’s post-Katrina coverage for The New Yorker, tells the story of modern-day New Orleans from the perspectives of nine residents over more than 40 years. The narrative is neatly bookended by two devastating hurricanes: Betsy in 1965 and, of course, Katrina in 2005. Mr. Baum’s opening pages, it turns out, were merely the squawks and squeaks of a big band prepping for a big night. Once the horn section kicks in, the sound is mighty and sad — a funeral parade sweeping through the streets. “Nine Lives” may be this young year’s most artful and emotionally resonating nonfiction book so far, and for that, to Mr. Baum, a belated New Year’s toast. Clearly I needed to make some new notes. This book does not retell the larger political history of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina; that ground has been covered, and well, in books like “The Great Deluge,” by Douglas Brinkley. Michael D. Brown, a k a Brownie, the director of FEMA when Katrina hit, is not mentioned in this book. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney barely appear. Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans dithers around in the background of a chapter or two, and Harry Connick Jr., at age 9, is invited to play piano at a benefit. But that’s about it in terms of big names. Mr. Baum’s story finds its center of gravity at street level, and he has selected a charming and fascinating cast of swells and strivers and convicts and crazies and persuaded them to tell us, through him, their stories. Among them are Frank Minyard, a trumpet-playing gynecologist turned Orleans Parish coroner; John Guidos, a former school football player and family man turned transsexual barkeep; Wilbert Rawlins Jr. — his dad played drums for Irma Thomas — who turns his life upside down to help poor kids play in school bands; Billy Grace, a well-connected young lawyer who is Rex, king of carnival; Tootie Montana, a Mardi Gras Indian chief who made his own elaborate costumes for more than 50 years; and Tim Bruneau, an intense New Orleans cop. These people’s stories wind around one another, illuminating life in almost every corner of the city, from the teeming streets of the Lower Ninth Ward to the august mansions of the French Quarter. There are marriages, divorces, scams, deaths, bands made and remade, drugs, affairs, babies born, jail sentences handed out. You begin to feel that Mr. Baum has his hands around the entire parish. “Stop thinking of New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States,” he advises. “Start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.” He adds, “New Orleans is a city-sized act of civil disobedience.” Katrina does not loom on the horizon until the last third of the book. As the storm approaches, some of Mr. Baum’s people flee the city while others stay put. The whole thing doesn’t seem so bad at first. The night of the storm, Officer Bruneau steps outside: “He filled his lungs. The tang of a thousand busted-open oak trees made the air taste scrubbed. It crackled with ozone and buzzed through his veins like giddy joy. New Orleans had never smelled so good.” Then the levees break, the water rises, and to everyone’s despairing astonishment help does not come. The police officer is forced to place “a dead citizen on the curb like a bagful of crawfish heads” because there is nowhere to take her. People are stranded for 10 days or so. The Superdome turns into a Dantean circle of hell. The coroner can’t figure out why no one is bringing in bodies. Soldiers aren’t allowed to pick them up; neither are state police. Eventually an outside contractor arrives, and the coroner says bitterly: “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.” Racial tensions that have simmered in “Nine Lives” bubble over the top. One man watches state troopers herding evacuees and can’t help thinking of World War II: “The troopers didn’t prod them with sticks, but neither did they help them carry their sacks. One led a German shepherd on a leash. It ran its nose eagerly over the bags and bundles.” In the months after the hurricane, when no one seemed to be returning to start over, the same man solemnly thinks: “A fundamental mistake had been made after Katrina. The government dangled a lot of resources, and it made everybody freeze up. Nobody wanted to start in until they saw what they were going to get. We knew after Betsy we weren’t going to get no help from anybody.” Maybe, he thinks, “that was better.” There’s a funny moment toward the end of “Nine Lives” when a beloved preacher says: “A sermon should be like a woman’s dress. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting.” Mr. Baum’s book clocks in at just a little over 300 pages, but it contains multitudes.  Novel by Philip K. Dick Gets an Ending Compiled by BEN SISARIO Published: February 16, 2009 Philip K. Dick’s last wife has reworked the novel he was working on when he died in 1982 and is publishing the book herself, The Guardian reported. Tessa Dick, the fifth wife of the science-fiction legend, told Self-Publishing Review, an online magazine (selfpublishingreview.com), that her version of “The Owl in Daylight” seeks to express “the spirit” of the proposed book, about which little is known. Ms. Dick said that a letter from her husband to his editor and agent revealed plans to “have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality,” and added: “The computer would be so advanced that it developed humanlike intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park.” The letter also mentioned Dante’s “Inferno” and the Faust legend, she said. “I hope that I have captured the spirit of ‘The Owl’ as Phil would have written it,” Ms. Dick added, “if his life had not been cut short by a massive stroke.” She has published the book through CreateSpace, an on-demand publishing service owned by Amazon.com, because she could not find a publisher, she said.   Beginning November 1, 2008, join our Pod and post your achievements, reminders, new websites, and etc. here. Any significant information you want noticed, including new releases, book signings, new business links, literary-based needs, and etc., will be added to this page and e-mailed to all members, daily. All you have to do is join the PEA POD and send us your postings using the contact card below - we'll do the rest while you sit back and relax. Alfred A. Knopf Jr., Influential Publisher, Dies at 90 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Published: February 16, 2009 Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who left the noted publishing house run by his parents to become one of the founders of Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died on Saturday. He was 90, the last of the surviving founders, and lived in New York City. Alfred A. Knopf Jr. in 1978; in 1959, a brownstone bookman. The cause of death was complications following a fall, his wife, Alice, said. The only child of the publishing giants Alfred A. and Blanche Wolf Knopf, Pat Knopf, as he was called, worked at his parents’ company, concentrating mainly on sales and marketing, when he approached his father about hiring the editor Simon Michael Bessie as the Knopfs’ eventual successor. Mr. Bessie had recently been passed over for the position of editor in chief at Harper & Row in favor of Evan Thomas. When his father refused, blaming his mother’s resistance (she apparently didn’t like Mr. Bessie), Mr. Knopf said in an interview in 2005, Mr. Knopf (pronounced with a hard “k”) decided to join Mr. Bessie and Hiram Haydn, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill, in founding Atheneum. They lined up four backers, each willing to put up $250,000, and established their offices in a four-story brownstone on East 38th Street. Cornelia Schaeffer, who would later become Mr. Bessie’s wife, joined the house as an editor about a year after its founding. Atheneum got lucky fast. Its first three lists produced three No. 1 best sellers: “The Last of the Just” (1960), a novel about the Holocaust by André Schwarz-Bart; “The Making of the President, 1960” (1961), the first in Theodore H. White’s series on presidential campaigns; and “The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait” (1962) by Frederic Morton. These books were acquired by Mr. Bessie, although by informal understanding each of the founders had to agree on every book the house published. Other projects, if not best sellers, also did well for the house. The first list included Jan de Hartog’s crime novel “The Inspector,” Wright Morris’s “Ceremony in Lone Tree” and William Goldman’s “Soldier in the Rain.” Atheneum later published Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1962), which sold more than 70,000 copies in hard- and softcover editions. On the other hand, having published Mario Puzo’s second novel, “The Fortunate Pilgrim” (1965), the house turned down “The Godfather” (published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1969). Mr. Haydn thought it “junk,” Mr. Knopf said. Although the founders called on their backers for what Mr. Knopf said was almost a second million, in part to start up a children’s book division in 1964, Atheneum prospered, and the three founders were able to exercise options to buy the company’s stock. “We had good lawyers,” Mr. Knopf later commented in an interview. “Everybody, including the original backers, was very happy.” In the 1970s, economic conditions began to make it harder for independent publishers to stay afloat. After selling 10 percent of the company to Raytheon, the electronics conglomerate, Atheneum in 1978 merged with Charles Scribner’s Sons, another independent house, to form a third entity, Scribner Book Companies, of which Charles Scribner Jr. became chairman and Mr. Knopf vice chairman, although both houses continued to operate independently. Mr. Haydn and Mr. Bessie had both left Atheneum by then. In 1984, Scribner Book Companies was acquired by Macmillan Inc., and Mr. Knopf assumed responsibility for all adult books put out by Scribner’s houses. He continued as a senior vice president of Macmillan until his retirement in 1988. Mr. Knopf was born in White Plains, N.Y., on June 17, 1918. At 7 he was sent to boarding school, first at the Riverdale Country Day School, in the Bronx, then from 1933 until 1937 at Phillips Exeter Academy. The summer after he graduated from Exeter, according to a 1959 story in Time magazine, he ran away from home, despondent over being turned down by Princeton and determined (he said in a note) not to return until he made good. Following a police search, he was found in Salt Lake City, “barefoot, hungry and broke.” After attending Union College for three years, he was inspired by the Veronica Lake film “I Wanted Wings” to join the United States Army Air Force, which called him up in December 1941. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his work in the 446th Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force, rising to the rank of captain. (Union awarded him a B.A. in 1945.) When he was discharged, he telephoned his father, who asked what he planned to do for a career. “I guess I’m going to work for you,” he said, and did. In 1952, he married Alice Laine. They had three children, Alison Insinger and Susan Knopf of New York and David A. Knopf of San Francisco. With a Disappearance, Life Turns Upside Down By JANET MASLIN Published: February 15, 2009 “The Local News,” a debut novel by Miriam Gershow, bears a family resemblance to “The Lovely Bones.” Ms. Gershow’s book is narrated by an adolescent girl, Lydia Pasternak, and describes the way her friends, parents and town are affected by the disappearance of a young person: Lydia’s brother. The cover art has a light blue backdrop that manages, with Pavlovian efficacy, to evoke the cover of “The Lovely Bones.”  “The Local News” and “The Lovely Bones”: these four-syllable titles even sound similar. That would be a petty point to make if it were not the kind of detail that Lydia often harps on herself. Lydia is an aloof, priggish 15-year-old, and she tells her story with nit-picking and sometimes noxious precision. She likes to show off by discussing subjects like Ugandan politics and exotic words in the text of “Richard III.” These predilections always differentiated Lydia from her brother, Danny, a brutish high school athlete three years her senior who could barely spell. When the family was intact, Lydia’s feelings toward Danny could best be described as mixed. But as “The Local News” begins, Danny has recently vanished on his way home from a basketball game. Lydia suddenly finds herself an object of extreme, syrupy sympathy and even an interviewee on local news. “Going missing, I wanted to yell from some deep, dark pit in the middle of me, was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done,” Lydia confides. But this is no time for disparaging Danny. Lydia is stuck at home with parents who have become obsessed with finding their child. (“Not you,” she tells herself; “their other child.”) The household refrigerator is reduced to bread heels and condiments as normal life becomes a thing of the past. And when Lydia goes to school, her classmates want to share in her tragic loss, if that is what Danny’s vanishing will turn out to be. It will be a long time before “The Local News” explains where he went, and why. The drama that fuels “The Local News” comes from Lydia’s inability to grasp how upset and frightened she is. She may be smug about her erudition, but she has no idea what has hit her. So she tries to conduct her life as if it were normal. She grudgingly goes to see a therapist, but is sure that she bores him. (“I’ve been waiting anxiously through my other patients to get to my time with you,” she imagines hearing from the therapist. But he says nothing of the kind.) And Lydia tries to enter Danny’s old world by fitting in with the football players and popular girls who would otherwise ignore her. “It was nice being stupid, the way it made people take care of me,” she decides. Most of “The Local News” nominally takes place during Lydia’s high school years. But this story is full of insightful, implicit hindsight as it illustrates how the trauma involving Danny will shape Lydia’s adulthood and forever stunt her ability to get along with others. Ms. Gershow captures the awkward, cringe-worthy friendship between Lydia and David, a good-hearted but charmless classmate who shares her interest in parsing African politics and is as old-shoe familiar to Lydia as he is nerdy. Lydia depends on him without exactly liking him. What she doesn’t realize is that she will never have such a fond, easy friendship again. Ms. Gershow has been a teacher at the University of Oregon, where some students’ online ratings of her sound like a continuation of Lydia’s high school nightmare. Being regarded as neither popular nor hot seems to be territory that Ms. Gershow knows well, maybe in the classroom and certainly on the pages of her unusually credible and precise novel. But these real-life disadvantages become assets in giving “The Local News” its strong verisimilitude, even in its graceless touches. Lydia’s annoying habits, like her clunky if accurate phonetic renderings of one character’s French-accented English (“lez guh een” for “let’s go in”), help to convey exactly who she is and exactly why gut-wrenching emotional changes are so hard for her. After a period of household paralysis during which her parents disintegrate pitiably, Lydia decides to take a more active approach to finding Danny. Her method: to develop a crush on the private investigator hired by the family and to try to impress him with her aggressive precocity. She takes notes, sorts letters from strangers (into Nice, Crazy, Wrong and Viable) and looks at a book of mug shots. In a passage that reflects this book’s stubborn stylistic awkwardness, she frees her imagination, “sprinkling the map with an army of my brothers who might at that very second be sticking his thumb into an Indian roadway or sleeping soundly in a faraway neighborhood or maybe even, I thought with a jittery nervousness, marching determinedly toward home.” It’s the inexorability of that image, rather than the phrasing, that gives “The Local News” its urgency and heft. Ms. Gershow makes it clear that she will resolve Danny’s story, and that the Danny or Dannys who populate Lydia’s fantasy life will become part of her real life too. “The Local News” has a deftly heartbreaking coda in which the adult Lydia appears, claiming to be “consumed” by her “obscure job analyzing data about sediment transport in estuarine systems,” and in not-quite-love with a man who collects early daguerreotype portraits. She is consumed, all right, but not in the way she imagines. It is Lydia who risks being buried in sediment and stuck in the past, regardless of what happened to her brother. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------    Feel free to submit current events or updates on your personal accomplishments using the form below. We retain the right to add Daily Ledger info at our own discretion.   Daily Ledger Form