STAGE

David Dorfman Dance

Connecticut College, Feb. 7-8

It’s always a joy to see a performance by David Dorfman Dance, but this one — the world premiere of the stunning “(A)Way Out of My Body” — was a particularly great pleasure in retrospect, since it wasn’t long after this that theaters went dark due to the coronavirus.

— Kristina Dorsey

“The Birds”

Flock Theatre

Wilcox Park, Westerly, Aug. 27-30

Hey, a little live Flock Theatre is better than no live Flock Theatre. The group usually performs often during the summers around here, but COVID limited most of its plays to online this year. Flock did, though, do some performances of Aristophanes’ comedy “The Birds” outdoors at Wilcox Park in Westerly, and it was just what theater fans needed.

— Kristina Dorsey

Randy Rainbow

Garde Arts Center, New London, Jan. 17

Randy Rainbow is flat-out hilarious. His song parodies went viral, with enough of a fan base to warrant turning them into a stage show and touring the country. His Garde gig was Rainbow bright.

— Kristina Dorsey 

BOOKS

Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Helen Zia

This was my favorite book of the year, a nonfiction work that follows four people who were living in Shanghai as it — and China — changed radically during the mid-1900s. They survive the Japanese occupation and the Nationalist/Communist struggle for power, and then try to flee the country as the Communists take hold. Each of these four figures has a fascinating story to tell, and their lives are completely different from one another’s. Spoiler alert: One of them is Zia’s mother.

— Kristina Dorsey 

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes

Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright Publishing)

Dolin is not the first writer to mine this territory. But while there have been engaging books about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (“Isaac's Storm”), the Hurricane of 1938 (“Sudden Sea”) and the Labor Day storm of 1935 (“Hemingway's Hurricane”), Dolin has taken on the ambitious task of surveying the known history of hurricanes in the United States. This conceit allows him to track advances in meteorology and the evolution of public thinking about a phenomenon that even now is not entirely predictable. What his reporting lacks in originality is more than made up for by his engaging and precise prose.

— Betty J. Cotter

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Robert Kolker

This is a devastating book, about a family suffering so much that you can't believe the story is true. But it is. The Galvin family had 12 children — and six developed schizophrenia. Kolker's reporting is richly detailed, and his writing effortlessly gets out of the way of the riveting tale.

— Kristina Dorsey

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

Jenn Shapland (Tin House Books)

In this coyly titled work of nonfiction, Shapland chronicles her fascination with the Southern writer Carson McCullers, whose novels included “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” and “The Member of the Wedding.” Shapland's hybrid approach — part memoir, part biography — is in service to her thesis that McCullers was a woman who loved women. Frustrated when McCullers experts dispute her conclusions, she writes, “Don't tell me there's just not enough evidence. Let's call a lesbian a lesbian.”

— Betty J. Cotter

The Operator

Gretchen Berg (William Morrow)

This charming novel centers on the tart tongued Vivian Dalton, a switchboard operator in 1950s Wooster, Ohio, who loves to eavesdrop. One day she gets an earful she doesn't expect. The narrator doesn't reveal the gossip right away; all we know is that it has made Vivian furious with her husband, Edward, and set off a flurry of passive-aggressive cookie-baking. In her first novel, Gretchen Berg has dialed up the past with verve, wit and compassion.

— Betty J. Cotter

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hachette Books)

The death of two female hitchhikers in 1980 sets the stage for this exploration of life in a rural corner of West Virginia. Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were headed to a Rainbow Gathering in the Monongahela National Forest, but they never made it. Their bodies were found shot to death in a remote field, a crime that sets neighbor against neighbor and exposes the fractures in this isolated community. Emma Copley Eisenberg uses her years living in West Virginia and working at a girls camp to explain the context of the murders and the botched investigation, in the process illuminating a rugged and misunderstood part of the country.

— Betty J. Cotter

What Are You Going Through

Sigrid Nunez

"What Are You Going Through" is on the surface a story about a woman's decision to bedsit while a cancer-stricken and longtime friend commits suicide rather than face the agonies of her disease. This in turn leads the nameless narrator to reflect back on a variety of relationships and experiences that define life — and death — in its myriad joys and sorrows. Funny, melancholy and astonishingly profound, this is very much a thematic companion piece to Nunez's "The Friend," the author's 2017 National Book Award-winning novel.

— Rick Koster

Broken

Don Winslow

The Rhody native's first-ever collection of shorter fiction, "Broken" serves as a dazzling mircrocosm of Winslow's astonishing mastery of crime fiction nuance — from comic noir to heart-whittling literary suspense. One can't help but marvel over the author and his magician's dexterity as he effortlessly mersmerizes the reader through a "pick a card, any card" array of styles without any shifts in the fun-ride momentum and Gene Krupa rhythmic acumen. And the titular novella that concludes the book is a devastatingly triumphant indictment of certain contemporary views on immigtation forged, one suspects, with Winslow's own tears.

— Rick Koster

Squeeze Me

Carl Hiaasen

If one's purpose is to "write funny," it's almost as though writers from Florida have an unfair advantage. "Go to a bar or gator ranch or Dade County election headquarters and come back with a novel" might be the rule of abundance down there. But Hiaasen is superb at using the Sunshine State as a lump of clay from which he can sculpt a laugh-till-your-lungs-pop-like-helium-balloons-at-a-carnival-dart-booth story that somehow connects with us all. "Squeeze Me" is so funny it hurts. On a lot of levels.

— Rick Koster

Lincoln's Lie

Elizabeth Mitchell

This nonfiction account of "fake news," which long pre-dates the Trump administration and is just one delicous and amazing aspect of wides-spread chicanery at the end of the Civil War, was the December pick for our "Read of The Day" book club event. As a journlalist, Mitchell does incredible work uncovering little-known bits of history; as a narrative spell-caster, she delivers her story with all the tension and wit of a cunning, red-herring-tossing thriller master.

— Rick Koster

The Fallen

Ace Atkins

Year after year, book after book, Atkins — who, it's only fair to acknowledge, is a friend — sculpts the saga of the felonious undercurrent of life in rural Tibbehah County, Mississippi. Sheriff Quinn Colson is the centerpiece character in an ongoing morality play boasting good, bad and just-tryin'-to-get-by folks in a small town that serves as a rotting gameboard in a much larger power struggle. "The Fallen" not only tightens a hangman's noose of plot threads but also kicks open the drop with shocking force.

— Rick Koster