New York Reader

Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat pairings: Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten.

Award winning author Laura Claridge was in the midst of writing the first critical biography of etiquette doyenne Emily Post when she started acted nonsensical, according to her family. To this day, Claridge has no firsthand memories of that nine month period in 2003, when, it turned out, her brain was indeed going crazy, due to a rare, devastating cancer.