By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez

“Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)” by Lorna Landvik
c.2019, University of Minnesota Press
$25.95 / higher in Canada  306 pages 

They say you can’t take it with you.

The money you’ve amassed, the property you own, jewelry, art, and fancy cars won’t mean a thing once you’re dead and gone. No, you can’t take it with you, but in the new novel “Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)” by Lorna Landvik, what’s been left behind?

If you asked Haze Evans how old she felt, she’d probably never say the truth (81), but not because of vanity. No, despite creaky knees and her status as the oldest employee at the Granite Creek Gazette, she preferred to focus on staying active, curious, and productive by writing a feature column several days a week.

The following review first appeared at the Lesbian Reading Room

By Velvet Lounger

Beowulf for Cretins, by Ann McMan
Print Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Bywater Books (June 26, 2018)

Take one rather lost and lonely English professor and sit her next to a gorgeous, intellectual and amusing woman on a flight to San Francisco. Bring them back together for a madcap costume party that evening, and make both of them brave enough to step out of their comfort zones and “go there.” That’s the basic plot of Ann McMan’s wonderful short story “Falling from Grace” in her anthology “Sidecar,” which led to the idea of “Beowulf for Cretins.”

Don’t worry if you haven’t read “Sidecar” (although if not, why not?) as the slightly amended story is repeated as chapter one of the full-length version. And once Grace and Abbie go their separate ways the morning after the party, with no contact details, not even last names shared, then surely it will take an act of fate, or possibly an act of God, to make their paths cross a second time.