The Open Road Blog

Editor's note: Today for Banned Books Week, some of Open Road's fiction writers weigh in on their favorite banned or challenged books.

"When I was twelve, I memorized a poem for English class:  Walt Whitman’s “This Dust Was Once The Man.”  I chose it because Whitman was the “good gray poet” and I a good green girl, because he wrote it when Lincoln was shot and it was a hundred years later and Kennedy was shot. I chose it because it was four lines.

When I was sixteen, I was a pent-up aching river with a body electric that wanted ...

Yesterday, June 12, was Susan Engberg’s birthday and to celebrate that occasion we’ve decided to feature her in our archival photo of the week. Engberg is the author of four short story collections, including Pastorale, A Stay by the River, Sarah’s Laughter, and Above the Houses. Her work has attracted substantial praise. Writing in The New York Times, critically-acclaimed novelist Russell Banks called the stories in Engberg’s first collection, Pastorale, “so good that they could change your life.”  The collection went on to win the 1983 Banta Book Award. In 1991 Michiko Kakutani, ...

Editor's Note: May is National Short Story Month and what better way to celebrate than to read one of the masters of the genre? New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has praised the short story writer Susan Engberg for her "uncanny understanding of the darting, itchy paths taken by the introspective mind," and her "lyrical, meticulous prose." The novelist Russell Banks once wrote that Engberg's stories "are so good that they could change your life." In her fourth collection, Above the Houses, excerpted below, Engberg continues to demonstrate why she deserves such accolades.

Mother of Chartres

By Susan ...