World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team
Peggy Shinn, ForeEdge (2018), 248 pp.
How did U.S. cross-country skiers Jessie Diggins, who trains each summer in Stratton, and Kikkan Randall grab gold in the 2018 Winter Olympics team sprint? Peggy Shinn, a Vermonter who writes for the U.S. Olympic Committee website TeamUSA.org, answers the question in her book “World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team.” Shinn notes in her University Press of New England paperback, “They have learned to focus on the positives and help each other through the negatives.”
Heart Spring Mountain
Robin MacArthur, Harper Collins (2018), 247 pp.
Marlboro writer Robin MacArthur’s novel “Heart Spring Mountain,” now in paperback is summed up by Library Journal as “soberingly relevant” yet contains what Kirkus Reviews calls “a sliver of optimism.” “We find communion in the most old-fashioned of ways—with food, and wine, and music, and art and candlelight,” MacArthur says. “Ultimately, this is a story about hope. Dark times are here, and more dark times await us, but love and connection and resiliency can be found, and will hold us when they are,” the author adds.
Koren. in the Wild
Ed Koren, Button Street Press (2018), 196 pp.
Vermont cartoonist Ed Koren draws for The New Yorker, published by global media powerhouse Condé Nast. Yet he’s distributing “Koren. in the Wild,” his first anthology in two decades, through Newfane’s Button Street Press, founded by Margot Zalkind Mayor, publisher of her husband Archer Mayor’s early regionally set mysteries. “His cartoons beautifully capture the duality of rural and urban life,” ice cream icon Ben Cohen writes in the anthology. “He’s got Vermonters looking at city folk, and city folk looking at Vermonters.”
Lords of St. Thomas
Jackson Ellis, Green Writers Press (2018), 184 pp.
Burlington writer Jackson Ellis sent his manuscript “Lords of St. Thomas” to the late Northeast Kingdom novelist Howard Frank Mosher, who in turn helped shepherd it to the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press, which has published it as the first winner of its Howard Frank Mosher Book Prize. “I am incredibly grateful for what Howard did for me,” Ellis says. “In the writing game—as in so many other games in life—it is impossible to underestimate how important it is to hear someone you admire say, You can do it.”
