It can be hard to force yourself to read about something as profoundly depressing as Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not even like reading about cancer, which most readers can reasonably assure themselves they don’t have. If you’re over 40 — or younger, in the case of early-onset AD — and you forget something at the grocery store, you don’t have to be a hypochondriac to worry AD might be sneaking up on you.... Read more

“Don’t tell anybody I showed you this,” Alison Bechdel told her fans packed into the St. Michael’s College McCarthy Arts Center last Tuesday night. She stood in front of a screen showing a slide from her beloved late comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” depicting a graphic bedroom scene.... Read more

Seth Steinzor, lawyer by day and poet the rest of the time, took the podium in Studio B last Saturday night at Burlington’s North End Studios. The room itself had been transformed from its daytime personality as a Zumba studio into a softly lit haven of literature, complete with microphone, refreshments, seating for a small crowd and books for sale.... Read more

Small-town newspaper writing can be fun, if only for its front-row seat on local life — the chance to ride shotgun in a cop car, or to interview and photograph local workers as they set up a Fourth of July parade or a Christmas wonderland. In her latest novel, A Cold and Lonely Place, Sara J. Henry places us right alongside Troy Chance as the reporter starts a story on a huge ice palace about to be built on Saranac Lake. The story soon turns into a mystery. And, like the best newspaper writers, Henry brings the North Country to vivid life via narrator and protagonist Troy.... Read more

Life might be easier for Kerry O’Brien if she didn’t live in Vermont. It would make more sense for the owner and designer of commando — which makes “invisible” undergarments — to live near New York’s garment district. There, the world’s most popular designers and models are so enamored of her products that, O’Brien says, one of them told her recently, “We can’t have Fashion Week without commando.”... Read more