Summer Solstice

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a LAMBDA LiteraryAward and the Massachusetts Book Award, the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, and the companion to Summer Solstice, the forthcoming Winter Solstice. She lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.

Praise for Summer Solstice“For those who cannot safely venture from their homes this season, MacLaughlin’s book can be that breath of fresh air, the nostalgic call back to better days, and the hope for a future when we can safely gather again under open sky... [Summer Solstice is] a brief reverie, short and sweet like the fleeting days it describes.”—Green Mountain Review“One can easily read this sensuous little book in an evening, or dawdle, as I’ve done, over the last week....It offers a vivid contrast to this moment of masks: the immediacy of a season bursting out of itself, elemental and clean.”—Joan Silverman, Portland Press HeraldPraise for Winter Solstice“Nina MacLaughlin returns to celebrate the winter solstice, and delivers a most sensual hymn and harbor for the human ability to feel our way through the darkness towards wise, unexpected connections. This ethereal collection offers us a candle at night—it’s an astonishing gift.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments “Nina MacLaughlin stands shoulder to shoulder with such writers as José Emilio Pacheco and Fleur Jaeggy. In Winter Solstice we are invited into the impending dark, guided through our own, and in the end given just enough light to survive. MacLaughlin’s meditation is both universal and uncommonly distinct. An immense joy to read, Winter Solstice is not so much an essay as it is a vision.” —Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry “Smart and lyrical—this book makes you feel alive.” —Nicholson Baker, author of The Anthologist