Mailbox Monday

I'm reading a book set in Montana right now.  This is Ted Kaczynski's mailbox in Montana - it's been taken down since his arrest and imprisonment for being the Unabomber.  It seems so ordinary until you think about all the horrible things he used the mail to do.

Two books this week:

Forest Gate by Peter Akinti (from the publisher).  Akinti's raw and riveting debut novel begins with Ashvin, an angry teenage Somali refugee, and his best friend, James, on opposite rooftops in the slums of East London preparing to hang themselves in a suicide pact. Ashvin leaps, unable to bear the reality of his own life—his activist parents murdered in Somalia; his brutal rape at the hands of Ethiopian soldiers; the constant harassment by London police and his schoolmates; the endless battles he will face as a black man in England. He leaves behind Meina, the beloved older sister he had always tried to protect. James, a lonely, studious teen, the baby of the drug-dealing Morrison clan, whose brothers are dehumanized, violent criminals, desperately wants to escape the family business, but he can't imagine a way out. When James jumps, but survives, Meina seeks James out, and they try to find shelter in one another. Akinti, himself a product of London's council estates (public housing), captures in gracious and resonant prose the fear, anger, and sadness of life in the violent and poverty-stricken slums of London's East End.

Reporting at Wit's End:  Tales from the New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway (from the publisher).  Named for his great-uncle, a prominent newspaperman, St. Clair McKelway was born with journalism in his blood. And in thirty-six years at The New Yorker, he made “fact-writing” his career. His prolific output for the magazine was defined by its incomparable wit and a love of New York’s rough edges. He had a deep affection for the city’s “rascals”: the junkmen, con men, counterfeiters, priests, beat cops, and fire marshals who colored life in old New York. And he wrote with levity and insight about his own life as well, a life marked by a strict Presbyterian childhood, a limited formal education, five marriages and divorces, and sometimes debilitating mental illness.


Visit Marcia at the Printed Page to see what everybody else got this week and to participate.  What'd you get?