WHERE TO BUY

WHERE TO BUY

A sincere, funny, and insightful novella from poet and filmmaker Courtney Bush.

Learning is a woman’s account of a single Monday working in a progressive New York City day care. The narrator, Courtney, spends her days in The Blue Room guiding her three-year-old students through the early lessons of their lives. Her consciousness flickers between the children—full of generosity, wonder, accidental brilliance, and infinite questions—and her life outside the classroom. While tying shoes and peeling clementines, Courtney returns to grief over the death of a hometown friend; her recent divorce; the hope of a new relationship; her family back in Mississippi; and thoughts on forgiveness, empathy, and her own capacity for cruelty. As the day goes on, a threat from the school director’s ex-boyfriend introduces real danger, tilting the fragile order of the classroom toward chaos.

Deeply felt and bracingly honest, Learning enacts the complexity of consciousness, itself a balance of presence, memory, risk-calculation, observation, imagination, and emergency. 

An expansive yet personal story of a town and a family changed by the breakneck pressures of modernization.

In a small industrial town in China, a family of three—a prideful teacher, her husband, and their quietly rebellious daughter—share a simple life, weathering moves, fights, a layoff, and illnesses. Two decades later, the daughter, now a writer living with her husband in America, reunites with her parents in her hometown after a long separation caused by a global pandemic. The trip is an occasion for her to reflect on her fraught relationship with her mother and the forces that pressurized and combusted their lives: echoes of distant wars and not-too-distant revolutions, tides of breakneck modernization, and the relentless erosion of time.

For fans of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Three is fable-like and precise, at once a sweeping view of an era and an elegy for a splintered family.