Blog
Farewell to Jane Lazarre
We are sad to learn of the passing of writer and teacher Jane Lazarre earlier this month at the age of 81. Lazarre was the author of several books with the Press. We first published Lazarre’s Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons in...
Jane Lazarre on How This Age of Crisis Affects Our Inner Worlds
Writer Jane Lazarre is no stranger to the pages of Lilith; an excerpt from her provocative and resonant novel, Inheritance, appeared in the Summer 2009 issue, and her memoirs The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter and The Mother Knot were both the subjects of...
Three Works by Jane Lazarre on Race & Whiteness
Labor Journal – Review of The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter
“Jane Lazarre’s memoir about her father is at once an intimate look into a rocky father-daughter relationship and an account of the fascinating life of a leader in the American Communist Party….the personal narratives offer a picture of the Party that cannot be found...
Jane Lazarre and Bel Olid – Maternity, Activism and Democracy
Behind the idealised image of maternity there are many truths that are frequently hidden, namely physical pain, tiredness, professional and career concerns, dissatisfaction, and even regret. There is a gap between the contradictions a mother may experience and what...
Conversation with NoViolet Bulawayo, Najat El Hachmi and Jane Lazarre, moderated by Tania Adam
Jane on a panel in Barcelona at the Open City Thinking Biennial speaking on writing and narratives. Read More: https://www.cccb.org/en/activities/file/conversation-with-noviolet-bulawayo-najat-el-hachmi-and-jane-lazarre-moderated-by-tania-adam/230037
Interview with Jane Lazarre
Deborah Kalb sits down with Lazarre to discuss her latest book Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir about your father, and how long did it take you to complete it? A: I decided to write this memoir about my father over 40 years after his death for many reasons –...
The Forward – Review of The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter
“The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter tells the story of a family, of the struggle between old and new homelands, and of a man trying to balance his idealism with a reality that falls short of it.” Jeff Fleischer, The Forward...
The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter
In a letter to his baby grandson, Bill Lazarre wrote that “unfortunately, despite the attempts by your grandpa and many others to present you with a better world, we were not very successful.” Born in 1902 amid the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Lazarre dedicated his life...
Where Do They Keep All The White People?
I try to rise up each time the pits of Trump fears and anger draw me down. Many people speak of the tangle of old fears and new, past traumatic times bleeding into these times now, like a ruined watercolor painting — liquid stress muddying what needs above all at this...
Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness
Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons – Jane Lazarre “An important affirmation of a white woman’s love of her Black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over.” – Alice Walker “A beautifully written, deeply thoughtful journey into the worlds of self and...
Hoarding: A Story
In the last years before her death, Zilla’s mother had become a hoarder. Always a lover of objects – furniture, clothes, radios, televisions, dishes – now those objects owned her three small rooms. With Nathan dead for five years, his places were the first to become...
Jane Lazarre, On the Problems of Breathing in America
“On Having Trouble Breathing,” published in TomDispatch and reprinted in Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and many other venues on line. This same essay, entitled “Once White in America,” is forthcoming in 2916 in the collection Our Black Sons Matter, edited by Georoge...
A Conversation With Jane Lazarre
In the summer of 2009, Lilith excerpted a section of Jane Lazarre’s harrowing novel, Inheritance. The book was recently published and Lilith’s Fiction Editor, Yona Zeldis McDonough, interviewed Lazarre–author of ten books and creator of the undergraduate writing...
Inheritance
Hamilton Stone Editions announces the publication of Inheritance, a novel of American race history: of relationships between people of different and mixed race heritages, relationships of love and friendship and profound loyalty, and relationships of deep ignorance,...
Some Place Quite Unknown – A novel by Jane Lazarre
Hamilton Stone Editions announces the publication in January 2009 of Some Place Quite Unknown. In her latest novel, Jane Lazarre explores memory and imagination-the intersection between what we have experienced and what we envisage- through a multi-layered telling of...
Selections from Hamilton Stone Editons’ Book List for 2008: The Horse and the Elephant
"The narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis, and Cardinal proves herself ideal in rendering this 'deep story' aspect of her life." (Toni Morrison, from Playing in the Dark p. v, writing about a story...
A Sort of Perfection – An interview with writer Jane Lazarre
Although Jane Lazarre’s remarkable memoir of her first years of motherhood was published nearly 30 years ago, the resonance — and relevance — of her story has barely faded. In The Mother Knot, Lazarre writes unsparingly of “the strange and paradoxical way in which the...
Matters of Race
Jane Lazarre is an award-winning writer of fiction, memoir and personal essay. Her most recent books are Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: A Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and, Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery, both published by Duke...