Your Mother Should Know

...by now, if you got her a subscription to the Apple-a-Month Club for Mothers Day last month. So now we can tell you all about May's (topical) subscription book, which was The Book of My Mother by Albert Cohen, translated by his wife and published in a lovely new edition by Archipelago Press. 

 Albert Cohen's The Book of My Mother defies classification, as a tribute to the complexities and depth of familial love should. Part memoir, part novel, and written originally as a collection of richly narrative and descriptive essays, the book is both the story of Cohen's relationship with and loss of his mother (who died shortly after he had left France for London to escape the Nazis during World War II) and a meditation on grief, family, exile and isolation. While you should probably keep tissues handy, there's great joy here, too -- Cohen, who once claimed that his true homeland was the French language, relays his often playful love for his mother in what seems to be a love affair with the sentence itself, each remarkably crafted and full of wit and wonder. Both a timely and timeless read for the month of Mothers Day.

Which brings us to the here and now, which is, in a happy coincidence (er, Hallmark scam, or whatever) the month of Fathers Day. If you're still looking for a gift for your old man, the Apple-a-Month-Club might be just the thing (though, as far as we know, there isn't a "Book of my Father" coming out this month, except this one, which is of course very serious and hard-hitting non-fiction and therefore disqualified.) In any case, imagine the look of delight on any loved one's face when they see this:

Subscribe, or just stay tuned for next month to find out what we send out in June (bearing in mind, of course, that what makes mail better than blog posts is that, uh,  it comes in the mail.)