Apartment Choice

I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...

Milford Public Library 101 N. Main St., 658-4312Dial-A-Story, 658-9540www.milford.lib.in.us Teen Book Club Teens entering sixth grade through 12th grade are invited to join the Teen Book Club for the Sept. 9 meeting. Teens choose monthly reads , get to know new friends, and enjoy snacks. Book club members are currently reading "Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls" by Lynn Weingarten. Newcomers are always welcome. Call for more information or for staff to place a hold for you on the most recent read. Lego Crew Milford Public Library’s Lego Crew will meet from 10:30 a.m. to noon Sept. 9. Building with LEGOs encourages STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) skills. Come on your own or come with a friend. Families are invited to spend time together through this creative exercise. Teens and kids older than 4 years old are welcome to come. Children younger than 6 years old need to be accompanied by an adult. Labor Day closing Milford Public Library will be closed for L...

Angie Friesen didn’t think much of it when her sixth-grade daughter, Annelise, told her she’d hit her elbow on a desk at school. It wasn’t until about a week later, when Annelise complained of pain from her elbow down to her hand, that the mother of four took her daughter to the family doctor for an X-ray. Nothing was broken. The pain continued . Within a few months, it had spread to Annelise’s shoulder blade. Another X-ray and a nerve study revealed no damage. Finally, a pediatrician gave a diagnosis. “I hate to even say the word,” Friesen remembers the doctor saying. He suspected her daughter had a condition called CRPS , or complex regional pain syndrome . In adults, the condition can be devastating, with burning pain that spreads, discoloration of a limb and the loss of function. Friesen’s pediatrician apparently didn ’t know it at the time, but children with CRPS often respond well to...

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866. VIII. HOW SHALL WE ENTERTAIN OUR COMPANY? “T he fact is," said Marianne, "we must have a party. Bob don't like to hear of it, but it must come. We are in debt to everybody: we have been invited everywhere, and never had anything like a party since we were married, and it won't do." "For my part, I hate parties," said Bob. "They put your house all out of order, give all the women a sick-headache, and all the men an indigestion; you never see anybody to any purpose; the girls look bewitched, and the women answer you at cross-purposes, and call you by the name of your next-door neighbor, in their agitation of mind. We stay out beyond our usual bedtime, come home and find some baby crying, or child who has been sitting up till nobody knows when; and the next morning, when I must be at my office by eight, and wife must attend to her children, we are sleepy and headachy. I protest against making overtures to entrap some hund...