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In ''Goldenseal,'' Maria Hummel takes readers into a hotel room, then unfurls her characters' complicated history. GOLDENSEAL, by Maria Hummel Maria Hummel's new novel, ''Goldenseal,'' begins in 1990, when Edith [...]

THE MERCIES By Kiran Millwood Hargrave On Christmas Eve 1617, a catastrophic storm hit the remote Finnmark region of Norway, drowning 40 men from the fishing village of Vardo in [...]

THE BIRD KING By G. Willow Wilson Readers who enjoy G. Willow Wilson's ''Ms. Marvel'' comics (as my 10-year-old son and I do) know with what a deft, sympathetic hand [...]

THE ROMANCE READER'S GUIDE TO LIFE By Sharon Pywell 308 pp. Flatiron Books. $25.99. Neave Terhune, one of the two narrators of Sharon Pywell's third novel, is a book thief. [...]

JUDASBy Amos OzTranslated by Nicholas de Lange305 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25. In a 2005 interview, George Saunders remarked that ''all moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns.'' He [...]

THE LIFE OF ELVES By Muriel Barbery Translated by Alison Anderson 258 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $17. Muriel Barbery's previous novels, ''The Elegance of the Hedgehog'' and ''Gourmet Rhapsody,'' took [...]

FOREST DARK Nicole Krauss HarperCollins 2017, 304 pp, $27.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In three of her novels thus far, Nicole Krauss inhabits multiple points of view, exploring the almost mystical ways [...]

The reference desk at Michigan State University (MSU) had settled into a routine, but when recent library school grad Emily Barton collaborated with Arlene Wesmantel, the head of reference, on [...]

The article deals with how educators can make better decisions based on evidence about education technology. Topics discussed include the parameters set by the U.S. Every Student Succeeds Act for instructional practices, the education technology research gap, and the three interrelated problems faced by educators which can be addressed by the EdTech Evidence Exchange Platform.

MOONGLOW Michael Chabon HarperCollins 2016, pp. 449, $28.99 Michael Chabon's first published works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, were realist, lovely and a little dull with caution. [...]

The article discusses that technology can transform teacher-centered classrooms into vibrant, student-centered learning environments. It mentions that consumer technology has conditioned us to think of tech products as intuitive, ready-to-use, with no manuals or training necessary; and also mentions that teachers need time to understand student-centered technologies and to build them into their curriculum.

THE WATERY PART OF THE WORLD By Michael Parker 261 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $23.95. American history brims with stories of mysterious disappearances. We still wonder what happened [...]

READING LIKE A WRITER A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. By Francine Prose. 273 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $23.95. At the start [...]

IT'S one of the most cherished American myths: that in the vast sprawl of our varied landscape, personal destinies can unfold without limits. Here, we like to believe, people are [...]

THE TAKING By J. D. Landis. 384 pp. New York: Ballantine Books. $24.95. THE title of J. D. Landis's third novel refers to the confiscation of land required to build [...]

THE LITTLE WOMEN By Katharine Weber. 240 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23. KATHARINE WEBER'S three novels all concern written documents. Her first, ''Objects in Mirror Are Closer [...]

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS By Cheryl Mendelson. 326 pp. New York: Random House. $24.95. WHEN the characters in Cheryl Mendelson's first novel are looking for entertainment, they often pick up the works [...]

PUSHKIN A Biography. By Elaine Feinstein. Ecco, $29.95. Elaine Feinstein's biography of Aleksandr Pushkin is perhaps somewhat too slim. There is little material that will be new to scholars. Yet [...]

THE ANNIVERSARY And Other Stories. By Louis Auchincloss. 192 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $25. THE title story in Louis Auchincloss's new book -- his 55th -- begins with its [...]

MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER By Roger McDonald. 365 pp. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. $25. IN his engaging novel ''Mr. Darwin's Shooter,'' the Australian writer Roger McDonald imagines the life of [...]

TAKEN IN By Beverly Coyle. 305 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. LIKE many good book titles, ''Taken In'' points the reader in two directions. To take someone in can mean [...]

A CONSPIRACY OF TALL MEN By Noah Hawley. Harmony, $23. Linus Owen teaches conspiracy theory at a small college in northern California. But despite his belief in an array of [...]

OBLIVION On Writers & Writing. By Donald Justice. Story Line, paper, $14. The ''Oblivion'' of Donald Justice's title is twofold, referring both to the obscurity beyond literal sense to which [...]

IF I WERE BOSS The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis. Edited by Anthony Di Renzo. Southern Illinois University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95. Sinclair Lewis is something of an oddity [...]

CREEK WALK And Other Stories. By Molly Giles. 129 pp. Watsonville, Calif.: Papier-Mache Press. $23 ''Whether you're on the beach or in bed with a lover or laughing with friends [...]

I WANT TO BUY A VOWEL A Novel of Illegal Alienation. By John Welter. Algonquin, $18.95. In his third novel, John Welter sets out to write a satire on the [...]

Other Entertainment Collected Pieces. By Ned Rorem. Simon & Schuster, $25. ''Out of Nantucket,'' the closing essay in Ned Rorem's new collection, ''Other Entertainment,'' transcends its sentimentality by painting a [...]

We held a technology session at the 2016 Annual Meeting of die American Society for Horticultural Science in Atlanta, GA, to provide guidance for technology choices in extension education and an opportunity to learn more about engaging new audiences, including the millennial generation (people bom between 1982 and 2000). The use of technology is now an integral part of extension-client interaction. Presenters in tiie session gave examples of when technologies such as blogs, social media accounts or web conferencing tools allowed extension personnel to increase engagement with online consumers and ultimately help fulfill extension's mission of extending knowledge and changing lives. Effective engagement requires both educators and learners to be satisfied with the exchange. It is critical to monitor the quality of these digitally facilitated exchanges as compared with traditional face-to-face interactions. Additionally, it is possible to quantify digital engagement with readily available metrics, such as "retweets" (a reposted or forwarded message) or "likes" (indication an item is appreciated). These allow innovative and substantive reporting to further justify continued use of digital technologies for enhancing client-extension relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2015 Delaware (DE) Master Gardener training, instructors synchronously delivered content to two trainee cohorts (Cohorts A and B) who met at three locations (Sites 1, 2, and 3) via video web conferencing (VWC). This reduced instructor delivery and travel time but warranted close examination of trainee learning outcomes and experiences. To evaluate the pilot implementation of remote deliver)', trainees [number of trainees (N) = 30] answered two open-ended application questions after 11 instructional sessions. One cohort received instruction face-to-face, while the other cohort synchronously received instruction via remote delivery [number of participants in cohort 1 (ni) = 17; number of participants in cohort 2 (n2) = 13]; each cohort was remote for about half of the sessions. The overall average face-to-face score assessing session content mastery was higher than the overall average remote score by 0.1, a 5% difference given the possible scores range of 0 to 2.0. When we grouped sessions by remote delivery site, delivery mode only significantly predicted average session scores for those sessions delivered remotely to Site 2 and not those delivered remotely to either Site 1 or Site 3. When we considered each session individually, delivery mode significantly predicted session scores for 2 of the 11 sessions, both broadcast remotely to trainees at Site 2, where the bandwidth was 10% of those at Sites 1 and 3. We suggest the VWC system performed particularly poorly for these sessions due to limited bandwidth. Posttraining survey results suggest the VWC system did not function well enough to approximate face-to-face instruction. The overall educational rating of the training was significantly higher than the media naturalness rating suggesting poor technical functionality did not substantially undermine trainees' perception of the education they received. This study indicates remote delivery is a viable strategy for improving the efficiency of training programs if it is consistently implemented with the appropriate technical infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUNDAY JEWS By Hortense Calisher. 694 pp. New York: Harcourt. $28. IN 1951, the year Bobby Thomson hit the 'shot heard round the world' into the stands at the Polo [...]

MY LITTLE. BLUE DRESS, by Bruno Maddox. (Penguin, $13.) This mock memoir of an Englishwoman born in 1900 is also a record of a dull and self-involved fictional author's efforts [...]

MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS By Bruno Maddox. 297 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. BRUNO MADDOX'S first novel, 'My Little Blue Dress,' begins as a send-up of a memoir, the life [...]

We report the assembly of colloidal particles into confined arrangements and patterns on various cleaned and chemically modified solid substrates using a method which we term “confined dewetting lithography” or CDL for short. The experimental setup for CDL is a simple deposition cell where an aqueous suspension of colloidal particles (e.g., polystyrene spheres) is placed between a floating deposition template (i.e., metal microgrid) and the solid substrate. The voids of the deposition template serve as an array of micrometer-sized reservoirs where several hydrodynamic processes are confined. These processes include water evaporation, meniscus formation, convective flow, rupturing, dewetting, and capillary-bridge formation. We discuss the optimal conditions where the CDL has a high efficiency to deposit intricate patterns of colloidal particles using polystyrene spheres (PS; 4.5, 2.0, 1.7, 0.11, 0.064 m diameter) and square and hexagonal deposition templates as model systems. We find that the optimization conditions of the CDL method, when using submicrometer, sulfate-functionalized PS particles, are primarily dependent on minimizing attractive particle-substrate interactions. The CDL methodology described herein presents a relatively simple and rapid method to assemble virtually any geometric pattern, including more complex patterns assembled using PS particles with different diameters, from aqueous suspensions by choosing suitable conditions and materials.

The facile deposition of para-substituted aryl films onto indium−tin oxide (ITO) electrodes by the electrochemical reduction of aryl diazonium salts in acetonitrile is reported. For the deposition conditions used in this report, the aryl film thicknesses are on the order of 1−6 nm, suggesting a multilayer structure. Regardless of the functional group on the aryl diazonium cation, (NO2, CO2H, or fluorene) the electrodeposition behavior onto ITO electrodes is similar to that seen on other electrode materials. XPS and UV−vis data support the introduction of organic functional surface groups to ITO. The blocking behavior of the aryl films on ITO toward the Ru(NH3)63+/2+ redox couple is in agreement with electron transfer through conjugated organic layers. The facile preparation of patterned aryl films with regular-spaced 700 nm voids on ITO is also described. Atomic force microscopy and scanning surface potential microscopy on patterned NO2 aryl films are used to assess the molecular structure and orientation. A 100 mV decrease in the contact potential over NO2 aryl films relative to bare ITO suggests that the aryl films are loosely structured as deposited with the NO2 groups oriented at a small angle away from the ITO surface.

Presents the short story "The Distillery," by Emily Barton.

The thing was, she had wished a thousand times for a different child. In moments of crisis, she wished passionately that he could be someone else, someone calmer, or more adaptable, or more like her. She hated herself for these wishes because he was also precious to her beyond reckoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," starring Neil Diamond, Laurence Olivier and Franklyn Ajaye.

This article presents the author's views on the art of writing. According to her, there is sometimes a middle ground between writing what one knows and writing what one don't know. There is always a pleasure in seeing one's own observation described in another's work. As a document, a book can record a single instance or strain of reasoning but not a total mental experience. She explains that sometimes she allay students' fears about intellectual ownership by assuring them that they could not copyright their story ideas even if they want to. INSET: excerpt from "Brookland".