Thursday, February 25, 2010

Madam Mayo is especially delighted to welcome today's guest-blogger, novelist Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age, a novel that has been receiving an avalanche of praise: it was a recent New York Times editor's pick, winner of the Elle Reader's Prize, an IndieNext pick, a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller and more. Over to you, Joanna!

New York Stories

The impetus for my novel, A Fortunate Age, came in part from a desire to capture a particular period in New York’s history. I grew up about 30 miles north of Manhattan, but always felt—like so many misunderstood suburban kids—- that the city was my spiritual home, my destiny. As a teenager, I spent every free minute wandering the streets of the Village and Morningside Heights, bidingMexican Empire, by Agustin Cadena, one of the terms I've been wondering about is "dance card"--- how (precisely) was that used in Mexico in Spanish? Well, surfeando, I found this delightful and informative webpage about 19th century dance cards here. If you know anything about dance cards in Mexico during the Second Empire, please do leave a comment! More anon.

Monday, February 08, 2010

E. Gould Buffum was in Lower California (Baja California) as an officer in the U.S. Army during the U.S.-Mexican War. I quoted from his delightfully vivid memoir of his time in and around La Paz and Todos Santos in my own memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico.Some years later, Buffum ended up in Paris as the correspondent for