What is Leah Hager Cohen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Leah Hager Cohen, author of No Book but the World.

Her entry begins:

At this point in the semester, should anyone ask what I’m reading, I’m liable to go sort of panicky-blank. “Golly, what have I been reading?” I think, trying to visualize a book, any book, I’ve been reading, to little avail. Then it hits me: student papers. My reading life has been flooded by April showers of my college students’ work.

I actually love this time. Any grumpiness over having to defer other kinds of reading -- awaiting me at this moment: Holding on Upside Down, the new Marianne Moore biography; Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World); and...[read on]

About No Book but the World, from the publisher:

At the edge of a woods, on the grounds of a defunct “free school,” Ava and her brother, Fred, shared a dreamy and seemingly idyllic childhood—a world defined largely by their imaginations and each other’s presence. Everyone is aware of Fred’s oddness or vague impairment, but his parents’ fierce disapproval of labels keeps him free of evaluation or intervention, and constantly at Ava’s side.

Decades later, then, when Ava learns that her brother is being held in a county jail for a shocking crime, she is frantic to piece together what actually happened. A boy is dead. But could Fred really have done what he is accused of? As she is drawn deeper into the details of the crime, Ava becomes obsessed with learning the truth, convinced that she and she alone will be able to reach her brother and explain him—and his innocence—to the world.

Leah Hager Cohen brings her trademark intelligence to a psychologically gripping, richly ambiguous story that suggests we may ultimately understand one another best not with facts alone, but through our imaginations.

Visit Leah Hager Cohen's website.

Writers Read: Leah Hager Cohen.

--Marshal Zeringue