PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter. Formerly an editor at The Boston Phoenix, she is a books columnist for The Boston Globe and has written for publications including The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, Bookslut, The Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan, andThe Huffington Post. She was also recognized in Refinery29's list of 21 New Authors You Need to Know. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Lit Hub Provocative reinterpretations of some very old stories . . . [Nina MacLaughlin] sets herself apart is by focusing on female characters, many of them less well known to a contemporary audience . . . MacLaughlin succeeds in making these stories fresh and distinct by allowing her protagonists to speak in their own voices. This creates stylistic variety across stories, but it also makes a powerful point . . . Some of these stories have distinctly modern touches--Galatea faints at a 7-Eleven because she's been on a fasting cleanse--but these moments only reinforce a sense of timelessness. There have always been men who will not hear when women speak. Vital, vivid, and angry. --Kirkus, starred review It's been a long time coming . . . In Nina MacLaughlin's Wake, Siren, we venture back into myth, to Ovid's Metamorphoses, to hear from the seductresses, the nymphs, and the goddesses. Finally. --Katie Yee, Lit Hub Ever since I first read Ovid's Metamorphoses, I've been waiting to hear from the sirens, goddesses, and nymphs in its pages. Nina MacLaughlin has granted my wish, in electric prose both modern and ancient, giving voice to the victims and villains whose only crime often was being female. Wake, Siren is a must-read for anyone who grew up reading myth but identified with the monsters. --Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World Nina MacLaughlin's first book taught me how to successfully grade a tile shower floor, and now she's gone and reimagined Ovid's mythical women, insinuating the rage of our contemporary moment into stories freshly alive with rumblings of gender and power. Weird, often hilarious, and consistently beautiful, Wake, Siren offers portraits of the likes of Medusa, Callisto, and Sibyl, but above all, it provides a breathless look inside a razor-sharp mind. --Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This Wake, Siren is ferocious and fun, full of tenderness and bravado. Nina MacLaughlin's curiosity and imagination will drive you back to ancient texts (or at least to Wikipedia), and make you look at literature differently, imagining what else could be transformed by the voices of women, speaking for themselves. --Meaghan O'Connell, author of And Now We Have Everything
