Maria Hummel

Kim Lord is an avant-garde figure, feminist icon, and agent provocateur in the L.A. art scene. As the city's richest art patrons pour into the Rocque Museum's opening night, all the staff hope the event will be enough to save the historic institution's flailing finances. Except Kim Lord never shows up to her own gala

A Novel

Still Lives

"Brenae Brazil is a rising star at Los Angeles Art College, the most prestigious art school in the country, and a pupil of the institution's equally famous and influential director, Hal Giroux. Brenae's path to art world stardom is all but assured, so why did she kill herself shortly after completing a provocative documentary about female bodies, violence, and self-defence? Maggie Richter's return to LA and her old job at the Rocque Museum was supposed to be about restarting her career, reconnecting with old friends, and maybe starting to date again. The last thing she expected was to find herself at the center of another art world mystery concerning the death of Brenae Brazil. Are there hidden clues in Brazil's other works of video art? Maggie will get pulled into the cryptic video art of Brazil that will send her down the rabbit hole of art schools, power struggles over students and mentors, and the still shady and often violent art world in Los Angeles. The work of Kim Lord and the fallout of the Still Lives exhibition looms continually over Maggie and our other returning cast members. Picking up where Still Lives-a Reeses's Book Club and Hello Sunshine selection-left off, Lesson In Red is a fast-paced thriller set against the cutthroat world of high art and the often fatal legacies of women who threaten its status quo"--

Lesson in Red

To provide for his children after being drafted into military service, surgeon Frank Kappus, a recent widower, marries a young woman who struggles to keep one of the children from being declared mentally unfit.

Motherland

A Gentleman in Moscow meets My Brilliant Friend in this novel of two estranged friends who reunite to confront each other and the devastating betrayal that tore them apart Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven’t spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret. Set against the vivid landscapes of Los Angeles and unfolding with the evanescence of a dream or a memory, Goldenseal peels away the layers of an intimate female friendship to reveal a stirring and haunting story about the search for connection and the lingering echoes of lost love.

Goldenseal

"A child is very ill; there is a hospital. . . . The subject is as basic as a bowl and a nail, wood and a house, and a house on fire." --Fanny Howe, from the introduction House and Fire is a mother's love song to her stricken young son, written over the years of his hospitalizations for an acute immune disorder. Maria Hummel is a poet of dazzling formal mastery, whose eerie, radiant lyrics and stories evoke the pediatric ward, California life, and the immortal, endangered world of childhood. This unforgettable debut was selected by Fanny Howe. From "House and Fire": for thirty-three years I didn't make anything with my body and thenyour brother and thenhe sickened watching him sleephooked to tubes an empty envelopeinside me fills each dawnwith one long love letter by night it's mostly apology A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Maria Hummel is the author of two novels and poetry and prose in Poetry, Narrative, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. She teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California. Fanny Howe has written many books of poetry, and her Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

House and Fire

Aan het eind van de Tweede Wereldoorlog is de jonge Liesl nog maar net getrouwd met een weduwnaar met drie jonge kinderen, of haar man wordt als arts naar een legerziekenhuis in Weimar gestuurd.

Moederland

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Alma Ruiz

Henri Focillon

Magdalena Atria

Fernando Bryce

'Poetics of the handmade' presents the work of eight Latin American artists engaged in the timeless practice of making art by hand. Making use of common objects to create a sense of familiarity for the viewer, these artists' interest in transformation and process has led them to make works that are painstakingly handcrafted from a wide range of materials. They find poetry in the depiction of ordinary objects and powerful resonance in small actions.

Poetics of the Handmade

Winter 1859: While exploring the frozen expanse of Lake Champlain, Isabel "Bel" Lindsey and her cousin Laurence assist a runaway slave, and the choice catapults them from their sheltered upbringing into the central issue of their time: slavery and the future of the Union.

Wilderness Run

The Glass of Fire

A companion to Still Lives—a Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine selection—this savvy thriller exposes dark questions about power and the art world and reveals the fatal mistakes that can befall those who threaten its status quo. Brenae Brasil is a rising star at Los Angeles Art College, the most prestigious art school in the country, and her path to art world celebrity is all but assured. Until she is found dead on campus, just after completing a provocative documentary about female bodies, coercion, and self-defense. Maggie Richter's return to L.A. and her job at the Rocque Museum was supposed to be about restarting her career and reconnecting with old friends. With mounting pressure to keep the museum open, the last thing she needs is to find herself at the center of another art world mystery. But when she uncovers a number of cryptic clues in Brasil’s video art, Maggie is suddenly caught up in the shadowy art world of Los Angeles, playing a very dangerous game with some very influential people. And the closer she gets to the truth, the more lies she threatens to expose. Maria Hummel, praised for her "genius for layering levels of meaning" (BBC), has brought us back to her provocative noir Los Angeles with this haunting investigation into power and the art world.

This “haunting” family saga set in WWII Germany “illuminates the reality of war away from the frontlines . . . with a compassion and depth of understanding that will touch your heart” (People). Inspired by the author’s extended family and their status as Mitläufer—Germans who ‘went along’ with Nazism, reaping its benefits and later paying the consequences Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author's father—a product of her grandparents’ fiercely protective love—and their status as passive Nazi–sympathizers known as Mitläufer. At the center of Motherland lies the Kappus family: Frank is a reconstructive surgeon who lost his beloved wife in childbirth. Two months later, just before being drafted into medical military service, Frank marries a young woman charged with looking after the surviving baby and his two grieving sons. Alone in the house, Liesl attempts to keep the children fed with dwindling food supplies, safe from the constant Allied air attacks and the tides of desperate refugees flooding their town. When one child begins to mentally unravel, Liesl must discover the source of the boy’s infirmity or lose him forever to Hadamar, the infamous hospital for “unfit” children. Bearing witness to the shame and courage of Third Reich families during the devastating final days of the war, each family member’s fateful choice leads the reader deeper into questions of complicity and innocence, and to the novel’s heartbreaking and unforgettable conclusion.

Maria Hummel

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