Apartment Choice

This post was written by Yingwen Huang, Processing Intern “I only wish I could send you some of this nice cool weather along with some rain and hail that we are having just now; for it would do Kingston a world of good. Even a little snow wouldn’t do any harm.” — David C. Hurd to his pen pal Avril Cato in Jamaica, March 16, 1914. Brooklyn Historical Society ." width="609" height="951" /> Portrait of David C. Hurd, 1914. David C. Hurd papers, 2015.019, Brooklyn Historical Society . In 2015, Brooklyn Historical Society acquired the papers of David C. Hurd from his granddaughter, Judith C. Lovell. David C. Hurd was a Jamaican immigrant who arrived in Brooklyn in 1907 at the age of twenty two. He settled on Myrtle Avenue near Borough Hall, where a community of African American and West Indian immigrants resided at the time. He also lived in various locations in the Fort Greene and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Trained as a teacher in Jamaica, Hur...

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...

Jim Pantaleo’s phone winked out sometime after 6:00 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2012. The last message he sent before it died was to his wife, Allison. “Love you forever,” it said. And then, nothing. Jim had spent the day before writing and drinking, slowly. From his perch at the corner of an L-shaped bar at a pub in Toronto’s east end, he tapped away at his laptop. He sipped beer and he did shots of “liquid cocaine,” a mix of Jagermeister and Goldschlager schnapps. Jim had arrived at the pub, Rails and Ales, at about 3 p.m. “He seemed very normal,” says Len Grammenopoulos, the bar’s owner. He ate some food. He joked around. Sometime after midnight, he sent his mother an email with seven letters inside. At about 2:30 a.m., he paid his tab — maybe $60, $70. He high-fived Len and he walked out. “I remember him saying ‘I’m gone,’” Len says. “And that was it.” Jim was gone. When Jim and Allison Pantaleo first met — as coworkers at a pub called Gabby ’s on the Danforth — it was something close to ...