Askold Melnyczuk and Mary Capello with P. Carl

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Collected here for the first time are selected essays, reviews, and remembrances by the award-winning Askold Melnyczuk―novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and editor―who has, for half a century, played an active role in shaping the American literary conversation. Articulating an unwavering faith in the civilizing power of literature, Melnyczuk’s With Madonna in Kyiv brings together meditations on the literary arts alongside recollections of writer-friends Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Oksana Zabuzhko, and others. This ardent, wide-ranging volume also includes pieces on writers such as Samuel Beckett, Grace Paley, Elias Khoury, Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Olga Tokarczuk, Delmore Schwartz, Alvaro Mutis, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Lesia Ukrainka, Vasyl Stus, and Volodymyr Dibrova.

Askold Melnyczuk is a novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and editor who has, for half a century, played an active role in shaping the American literary conversation.

When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary’s one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays—with her mother’s own writing interspersed—Frost Will Come is a daughter’s tribute to her mother’s months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.

Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge—from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a “peaceful death” as a sign of a moral failing. More than a memoir of grief, Frost Will Come is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.

A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, Mary Cappello is a literary nonfictionist, cultural theorist and educator working in the vanguard of the essay, memoir, and documentary art.

P. Carl is a Senior Distinguished Artist in Residence, Department of Performing Arts, at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the play adaptation Becoming a Man commissioned and produced by American Repertory Theater (ART), Harvard in February of 2024. The play was nominated for Outstanding New Play by the Boston Theater Critics Association. Becoming a Man had its West Coast Premiere in San Francisco at Z Space in May/June of 2026 to sold out houses. He received a Trust and Storytelling Fellowship from Boston University for 2026-27. He is a recipient of the Camargo Foundation/Racial Imaginary Institute residency in Marseille, France for the summer of 2027. He was the Anschutz Fellow at Princeton University, an Art of Change Fellow with the Ford Foundation, awarded the Berlin Prize fellowship from the American Academy, and the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Research Residency at the University of Washington. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, Lit Hub, and the Ocean State Review. He is currently working on his next book, Vagrant and a new play Rare Birds commissioned by ART.

Carl received a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and a Masters in Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, and holds a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota. He was born in Elkhart, Indiana, and now lives in Rhode Island with his spouse, the writer Lynette D'Amico.

Brookline Booksmith, thriving in the heart of Coolidge Corner in Brookline, Massachusetts, since 1961, is one of New England’s premier independent bookstores. We offer a vast selection of books, ranging from current bestsellers to the most eclectic titles. We are also known for our beautiful and inspired gifts. Customers buy and sell gently used books in our treasured Used Book Cellar and enjoy our bountiful bargain book selection. We host award-winning events series (including our groundbreaking Transnational Literature Series), offering more than 300 author talks, community conversations, and book clubs annually. Find more at brooklinebooksmith.com!