Thread by @PENamerica

📚 It's #FridayReads time! 📚

.@fletchlivesaf is reading Dreamland by @samquinones7, an "exploration of how heroin was able to take hold of middle class America and how Purdue Pharma helped that happen."

.@SuzanneNossel is reading Mike @McFaul's Cold War Hot Peace, "a vivid insider account of his time managing US-Russia relations during the Obama Administration that offers a critical foundation for understanding how ties have further deteriorated since."

Lily Philpott is reading @Emilferrisdraws's graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which follows a young girl named Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbor, a Holocaust survivor, against the turbulent background of 1960s Chicago.

.@JRTtager just finished The Black Hand by @stephantalty, "the incredible true story about an Italian-American detective's efforts to bring down a deadly proto-Mafia crime ring while dealing with wider anti-immigrant sentiment at the turn of the last century."

Kim Chan is reading James Luna: Emendatio, the catalog from the his Venice Biennale installation in 2005. Luna is an internationally-renowned artist "who contributed immensely to catalyzing awareness that indigenous artists are contemporary visionaries rather than artifacts."

Stacy Valis is re-reading Black Sheep Boy by Martin Pousson, "a gorgeous, heartbreaking, redemptive story of a young gay man growing up on the Bayou, a dark, haunting, fairy tale told in poetic prose" (and the winner of the PEN Los Angeles award for Fiction in 2017!).

.@jafreenmu is reading Winners Take All by @AnandWrites, "a really candid and brutally honest take on philanthropy, capitalism, and inequality."

On her 7th-grade son's recommendation, @MLRStrategy just finished A Long Walk to Water by @LindaSuePark, which tells the true story and plight of Salva Dut, a Lost Boy from Sudan, and "made for a teary yet inspired subway ride."

.@thomasomelia just read (and reviewed for @aminterest) @NormEisen's forthcoming The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House, "a marvelous work of history thinly disguised as a memoir of Eisen’s time as Obama's envoy to the Czech Republic."

.@caits_meissner is reading Conflict Is Not Abuse by @sarahschulman3, which "asks hard and necessary questions about society’s perpetrator/victim binary, inviting close examination of how our own rigid self-concepts might be functioning as propellants of a punitive culture."