It’s amusing now to think that a mere generation ago South Florida was considered a cultural wasteland were people did not read. Today the region is blessed with several of the most influential – and fun! – book festivals in the nation, if not the world.

Take the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, for example. The youngest of the region’s literary events, in only eight years it has established itself as an equal to the more venerable Miami Book Fair or the Key West Literary Seminar, at least when it comes to prestige.

“We’ve become a major player in the poetry world,” says founder and director Miles Coon with justifiable pride. “I say the same thing every year. The poets coming this year are so different from one another, it’s going to be terrific.”

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival combines workshops for aspiring poets with plenty of public readings and other events. Running Jan. 16-21, this season’s slate of featured writers is headed by Pulitzer and National Book Award-winner Charles Wright.

“I’d describe him as a metaphysical poet,” says Coon, a lawyer-turned-poet who studied with Wright at the University of Virginia. “His poems reflect what we see and illuminate it in a fresh and original way.”

Other poets range from Kim Addonizio and David Kirby to Gregory Orr, Claudia Emerson, Cornelius Eady, Thomas Lux, Chase Twichell, Eleanor Wilner, and performance poets Jamaal May and Vanessa Hidary.

For a complete schedule and workshop registration, visit http://www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org/home/. Plenty of room remains in the workshops.

“Our reputation keeps growing,” Coon says.

The traditional beginning of the South Florida literary season remains Miami Book Fair International, one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most beloved book events. This year’s event runs Nov. 13-20, and features – as always --an embarrassing wealth of authors, such as Roseanne Cash, Daniel Closes, William Kennedy, Michael Moore, Colson Whitehead, Michael Ondaatje, Téa Obreht, Harry Belafonte and hundreds of others.

This year’s featured country is China – what could be hotter? All events, including the weekend street fair, will be held at the downtown campus of Miami-Dade College. For more information, visit http://www.miamibookfair.com/.

“We have a lot of writers here for the first time, like Tea Obrecht or William Kennedy,” says book fair co-founder Mitchell Kaplan, “and a lot of favorites coming back, like Michael Ondaatje.”

With its overflowing number of writers, plus the street fair, exhibitors’ booths children’s activities, and other attractions, the Miami Book Fair is a giddy-making event, almost an orgy of reading, and certainly the high point of the literary season in South Florida.

The Key West Literary Seminar celebrates its 30^th anniversary with a survey of futuristic fiction titled Yet Another World. Set for Jan. 5-8, the event boasts a gaudy line-up of emerging and established literary stars, including Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, Gary Shteyngart, Douglas Coupland, William Gibson, China Mieville, and Joyce Carol Oates.

“This year’s ‘futuristic’ theme might highlight the fact that reading and writing are thriving as much as ever,” says seminar media director Arlo Haskell, “no matter the advent of technologies which threaten to distract our attention.”

The Key West Literary Seminar, the most intimate and rewarding book event on the calendar, routinely sells out. For more information and registration, visit http://www.kwls.org/seminar/.

Organizers at the Broward County Library Foundation are still putting together the slate of writers for 24^th edition of Literary Feast, but they already have commitments from Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow and African-American novelist Bernice McFadden.

“We’re looking forward to an exciting event with some 20 nationally recognized authors,” says Dorothy Klein, executive director. “We’ll have something for everyone, whether they be students, library donors or book lovers.”

Literary Feasts consists of a fundraising event, with authors appearing at private homes for dinner, and a day of free public lectures and panel discussions at Nova Southeastern University. Last year, the foundation raised $144,000 for the library system.

This season’s Feast weekend is scheduled for March 2-5. “We encourage everyone to follow our confirmed authors and event details on our website, www.literaryfeastonline.org, and on our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/bplfoundation.”

Literature is only a portion of what the Festival of the Arts Boca has on offer – there’s music and dance, too – but it’s a serious part, with an emphasis on history and current affairs, and nary a novelist in the mix. Set for March 10-16, the festival lineup includes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, among others.

“Kevin Bleyer is coming back, which speaks volumes for the festival,” says festival chairman Charlie Siemon. “Doris Kearns Goodwin will also return and having her as our distinguished writer in residence is another indication of our growing stature. We think having Mika Brzenzinski and Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Festival 2012 shows that our goal of being the ‘festival of ideas’ has become a reality.”

The festival will have an updated website by October. In the meantime, call 866-571-ARTS for more information.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, U.S. authorities rounded up thousands of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast and shipped them to internment camps, fearing they might be traitors.

In her compelling new novella, The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka captures in spare prose the paranoia of that period. She opens by describing the arduous voyage by ship of mail-order brides from Japan to California early in the last century. The story continues with their crushing disappointments and hardships, and ends with the mass deportation of individuals and families to camps far from the coast.

There is no plot line and no central characters. Otsuka effectively uses the collective “we” to describe the brides and their travails.

“On the boat we were mostly virgins,” the book begins. “We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only 14 years old and were still young girls ourselves.”

The Buddha in the Attic follows Otsuka’s 2002 debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, which was greeted with wide critical acclaim.

The mail-order brides crossed the ocean with a mixture of joyful anticipation and dread. They carried pictures of their future Japanese-born husbands, along with silk kimonos for their wedding night. But the men they met on the dock bore little resemblance to the pictures taken 20 years ago. For many their wedding night was a nightmare of forced sex.

Some settled on farms, others became maids, and all faced the threat of unwanted sexual advances, sometimes from bosses. Some were barren and others bore numerous babies. As the children grew, they quickly learned English, absorbed the culture and rejected their parents’ ways.

“They forgot how to pray. … They gave themselves new names we had not chosen for them and could barely pronounce. … Mostly, they were ashamed of us. … Our heavy accents. … Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun.”

Otsuka based the story on extensive research, and it shows. She never tries to simplify the brides’ experiences or fit them into a mold. Some marriages endured and others fell apart. Some brides left their husbands and returned to Japan.

Because of the author’s reliance on a collective voice, none of the characters are fully formed. A few women are named, but they quickly disappear without leaving a lasting impression. And yet the collective hardships and anxieties will linger in the imagination, leaving no doubt that Otsuka is a writer with a beguiling fresh voice.

Otsuka writes about the brides without moralizing or judging. She is particularly effective in invoking the fear and isolation that gripped Japanese-Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

“There was talk of a list,” she writes. “Some people being taken away in the middle of the night. A banker who went to work and never came home. … A few more of our men disappeared every day. … Soon we were hearing stories of entire communities being taken away.”

Families packed suitcases with their necessities. One woman left “a tiny laughing brass Buddha up high, in a corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day,” hence the book’s title. Soon looters began breaking into the now-empty houses.

The final chapter, “A Disappearance,” describes the mostly indifferent reaction of neighbors to the departure of the Japanese-Americans. Rumors circulated about caches of weapons found in their cellars. People wanted to believe that their former neighbors were “good, trustworthy citizens,” but “of their absolute loyalty we could not be sure.”

Otsuka ends this haunting novella on this poignant note, “We speak of them rarely now, if at all. … All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world.”

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka; Knopf; 129 pp.; $22

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Death by dieting isn’t necessarily a case of anorexia. In Adam Ross’s original yet perplexing debut novel, Mr. Peanut, a young wife is found murdered after she manages to lose more than 100 pounds. The murder weapon is a plate of peanuts, the number one suspect her heft-loving husband who swears he didn’t do it.

Over the course of their 13-year marriage, Alice Pepin had tried a Marquis de Sade arsenal of weight-loss machinery and restrictive diets. Whatever was offered up on late-night TV, Alice embraced and believed in its powers to relieve her of her burden of obesity.

Husband David urges her on, assembling the contraptions and engaging in endless conversations on minuscule movements of the arrow on the scale.

“There were pills and special sponges, protein shakes and magic reducing belts: the usual hokum, which he purchased for her willingly,” Ross writes. “With the machines, assembly was often required. And ultimately, David was called into the living room to Alice’s rescue where she would be sitting in the middle of a pile of locking screws, bolts, boards, wheels, and wrapped pieces of metal, the parts numbered and lettered (5Q,F9) spread in a circle around her as if she was ground zero.”

David, described as “a Jewish Henry VIII,” is a successful game designer, and while he obliges Alice her hope for transformation, he secretly counts the days until she falls off the wagon while fantasizing her death.

David wants freedom from the marriage, a chance to start over with a clean slate. What he gets are two of New York’s finest facing off in an elongated good-cop, bad-cop scenario that leaves the reader spinning. Mr. Peanut is a police procedural with a twist, lit with starbursts of psychological insight.

“We tell stories of other people’s marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. But can we tell the story of our own? If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.”

Both detectives are plagued with marriages they want out of. Ward Hastroll (whose name is an anagram for Lars Thorwald, Hitchcock’s wife killer in Rear Window) fantasizes an especially gruesome suffocation when his wife refuses to leave her bed for five months to illustrate how she has become invisible to him. Hastroll believes David is guilty.

The other detective, Sam Sheppard – yes, that Sam Sheppard -- is dragged up from the dead to act as the cop who believes David is innocent just as he claimed it was an intruder who killed his wife. (Sheppard, an Ohio physician, was convicted in 1954 of murdering his pregnant wife, but was acquitted after a retrial 12 years later. The television show and film The Fugitive are said to be based on the case.)

Ross’s Sheppard is consumed by reliving the details of his marriage and its demise, and large chucks of the story are taken over with his musings.

The triple echoes of the restrictions and sacrifices of marriage are stifling, and at times it is the reader who wishes to escape the bonds. As suffocating as Alice’s offending peanut is the fact David is secretly writing a novel that begins with the same introductory sentence as Mr. Peanut.

But one cannot escape just how clever Ross is. From his riffs on Hitchcock movies to his obsession with M.C. Escher, to a murderous midget named Mobius who smacks home the message of the unrelenting nature of marriage, the novel is filled with “hobby horses” to get lost in.

Mr. Peanut is not for lazy readers or those who want their plot lines to unfold in a linear matter. For all its blathering, it has moments of brilliance that make one eager for Ross’s next book.

MR. PEANUT, by Adam Ross; 352 pp., Knopf, $25.95 (cloth); $22.50 (audio book); $15 (paper); $9.99 (e-book)

When a blood clot lodges in the brain, patients may lose their ability to speak or write, a devastating setback for anyone, but particularly so for an author.

Husband-and-wife authors Diane Ackerman and Paul West had devoted their lives to words until that awful day in 2003 when West suffered a stroke that left him devoid of language, an outcome known as aphasia.

One Hundred Names for Love is Ackerman’s affecting account of the long, ongoing recovery process and its crushing impact on their lives.

The book can be read on three levels -- a tender love story, a meticulous examination of aphasia, and the latest example of Ackerman’s gorgeous writing.

Ackerman and West met in the early 1970s at Penn State University, where he was a professor and she was a student, 18 years younger than him. They enjoyed parallel literary careers, he as a fiction writer and she as the non-fiction author of widely admired books such as A Natural History of the Senses.

After his stroke West, in effect, became a child again, having lost the ability to speak or perform everyday tasks, such as shaving, combing his hair or brushing his teeth. He couldn’t read, tell time or drink water without choking. His case was particularly severe because he could neither speak nor understand what people said to him. All he could mutter was “mem,” and he would shout “mem, mem, mem” as a curse when no one could figure out his meaning. Ackerman dutifully records the glacial, frustrating process of helping her husband rebuild his vocabulary one word at a time.

She candidly admits to becoming “impatient and resentful” over assuming the roles of teacher, nurse, attendant and caregiver, which cut into her own writing time.

Taking away West’s speech was, in Ackerman’s words, “like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical cord to loved ones. …”

She describes tender scenes of the couple cuddling in bed and spending evenings making “soulful monkey baby sounds of pure emotion … and laughing at how silly we could still be together, words or no.”

Ackerman summarizes what science knows about how the brain handles speech and memory, as she sets out to learn everything she can about aphasia. She learns that Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams and Samuel Johnson also suffered from aphasia.

Doctors had predicted that West would never write again, and were astonished when, with help, he gradually relearned the alphabet and began writing short stories and even books of fiction, although it became clear he would not regain his full pre-stroke language ability. He still cannot use a computer or typewriter and has trouble reading his own handwriting.

Years after his stroke, “wrong words still veered through his speech like errant comets.” When Ackerman says she does not understand, he repeats a stream of nonsense, knowing what he wants to say, but unable to “harpoon the right words.

The book’s title comes from West’s endearing habit of showering Ackerman with scores of names such as Celestial Elf, My Little Spice Owl, Romantic Little Dew-Sipper.

Several years into her husband’s rehabilitation, Ackerman has learned to live in the moment without worrying about the future. “We unwrap one day a time, treating it as a star-spangled gift,” she writes.

I have two minor reservations about this otherwise memorable book. The descriptions of West’s determined struggle to talk become repetitious, and the book is filled with more science than general readers might want or need.

Yet One Hundred Names for Love should prove inspirational for anyone who has a family member suffering from aphasia, as it demonstrates that even when the prognosis is bleak, remarkable progress is possible by swamping the patient “with language all day long.”

Ackerman ends with a heartfelt reflection on impermanence. “When Paul is gone,” she writes, “the trees and sky will still be beautiful, I will still be poignantly aware of life’s transience, and how lucky I am to be alive on this planet in space. It’s all part of the adventure. I will still cherish being alive, even though I will miss him fiercely. And, oddly enough, I will probably look back on these days as some of the happiest of my life, despite all the worries, frights and impediments, because I loved heartily and felt equally loved in return.”

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing, by Diane Ackerman; Norton; 322 pp.; $26.95

John Darnton was 11 months old when his father, Barney Darnton, was killed during World War II while reporting on the war in the Pacific for The New York Times.

Almost a Family is a meticulous reconstruction of the lives of the Darnton family – the author, his older brother and their mom and dad. The book is, by turns, illuminating, gripping and sad.

Growing up, the author knew little about his dad, beyond the idealistic portrait painted by his mother. The younger Darnton eventually followed in his dad’s footsteps when he, too, became a reporter at The New York Times. After the author retired several years ago, he decided to find out more about the mysterious man who was his father.

Darnton knew that his dad had been killed by friendly fire when a U.S. pilot mistook an American warship for a Japanese vessel. A bomb fragment pierced Barney’s skull, killing him. Darnton chronicles his dogged effort to learn as much as possible about that ill-fated day.

He even hired a private detective to track down the son of the now-deceased U.S. pilot, but the son knew nothing about the errant bombing. After considerable research, the author concluded that his dad’s death resulted from a “tragic series of blunders both in the air and on water.”

Darnton learned that his dad was a heavy drinker and a womanizer, swept up in the bohemian culture of the Roaring Twenties.

He was shocked when he discovered that his mom and dad were not married, despite what everyone had believed. When they met, each was already married. They both got a divorce, but stopped short of marrying each other.

The book excels in its discussion of memory, alcoholism and the craft of investigative reporting, tied together by the author’s agile prose and smooth storytelling. Reporters who spend their careers writing breaking news stories often stumble when they try to write a book, but Darnton’s account is a notable exception.

Not long after Barney died, Darnton’s mother got a job as a reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau, and later became the newspaper’s woman’s editor. But the author was mystified by his mom’s increasingly bizarre behavior. Meals were missed, and the house started to fall apart. When a neighborhood boy suggested that Darnton’s mom was a drunk, he refused to believe it.

Eventually, mom hit bottom and sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous. She pledged never to drink again, and apparently kept that promise. She later died of cancer at age 61. The author’s vivid description of the devastation of alcoholism is pitch-perfect. He describes the night mom was suffering from withdrawal-induced convulsions, and a doctor instructed him over the phone to press a spoon into her mouth so she would not swallow her tongue.

Almost a Family reminds one of another recent memoir, The Memory Palace, because of each book’s honest discussion of the fragility of memory.

Darnton scrupulously reports only what he can verify. He displays the best instincts of an investigative reporter, tracking down people who might have known his dad and poring over old newspaper files and government records.

As a fascinating aside, Darnton describes his career at The New York Times, starting as a copyboy and eventually including assignments in Africa and Poland, which led to a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting.

Despite the irresistible pull of this memoir, I have two minor reservations. Darnton recalls his days as a youthful “troublemaker” who stole cars, was kicked out of prep school, and lost his virginity in a whorehouse in Mexico. But he says nothing about the morality or appropriateness of his wanton behavior, nor does he voice any regrets.

In addition, Darnton’s frank discussion of his parents’ sexual, alcoholic escapades raises the touchy question of what is fair game in memoir writing when mom and dad are dead and cannot offer a rebuttal.

Nevertheless, Almost a Family is a richly detailed account of one family’s tumultuous intersection with culture, addiction, war and changing values in American society.

Almost a Family: A Memoir, by John Darnton; Knopf; 348 pp.; $27.95

Bill Williams is a free-lance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .