Apartment Choice

UConn’s place in the Hartford skyline . Hartford — For nearly a half-century, the University of Connecticut has had no place to call its own in the state’s capital city. Today that changes as Connecticut’s flagship university opens the doors of its new $140- million downtown branch campus on Prospect Street . The arrival of the campus, which comes after five years of false starts and setbacks, is a milestone for the university and the city of Hartford. Hundreds attended the grand opening ceremony downtown Wednesday morning . For UConn, it marks the institution’s return from the suburbs into the heart of the city – where the school first opened its Greater Hartford branch in 1939. It moved to West Hartford in 1970. The university, in the years since, had been able to continue to claim a “presence” downtown. Some of UConn’s graduate business programs are housed in a space it leases in 100 Constitution Plaza, and the university’s basketball and ice hockey teams play games in the XL ...

Along the busy Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in Dunwoody is a sprawling collection of two- story apartment buildings . The units are worn but relatively kept up. Dozens of children play soccer or run in the parking lots. And numerous vans with ladders atop their roofs indicate a working class clientele . The buildings and their occupants might be largely unremarkable, but the Dunwoody Glen and Lacota apartment complexes and their 2,000-plus mostly Hispanic residents are now the focus of a controversy that has divided this newly incorporated suburban enclave and led to a federal lawsuit . In 2011, Dunwoody officials pushed a bond referendum that would raise money to demolish two aging apartment complexes and build a sprawling — and badly needed — park. Then- Mayor Ken Wright extolled the effort in a press release just before the vote but added that while the city “regrets the need to displace residents (in) 785 apartment units” it would work to relocate those citizens, including...

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...