Dirt
Though set in the nineteen-eighties (with cassette tapes and “Bonanza” reruns but no cell phones or e-mail), this California-gothic novel essentially takes place in the realm of myth. Galen, the...
View ArticleThe Heart Broke In
To whom does one answer in a world that is post-God, that might even be post-love? For Richie, a philandering pop star turned television producer, the rule is simple: don’t get caught. A former...
View ArticleJohn Keats
Keats was both inspired and tormented by his admiration for Shakespeare, who, he wrote, “left nothing to say about nothing or any thing.” A similar anxiety might haunt any biographer tackling so...
View ArticleMagnificence
“God damn. Death made everything so serious.” This novel, the last in a trilogy, is replete with tragedy and the breed of humor that tragedy begets. When Susan, an adulterous woman, learns of her...
View ArticleThe Antagonist
“When you’re fourteen but look like you are twenty-two, you rapidly figure out a few things about the human condition,” writes Gordon Rankin, Jr., nicknamed Rank, who is the protagonist of this...
View ArticleThe Reenactments
As a genre, memoir is always vulnerable to accusations of self-absorption, so this memoir about the forty-day shoot of “Being Flynn,” a film based on the author’s previous memoir, takes a considerable...
View ArticleScenes from Early Life
This novel, written in the voice of the author’s Dhaka-born husband, focusses on the period of the Bangladesh Liberation War, in 1971. Saadi, the youngest in a well-to-do Bengali family, recounts his...
View ArticleThe Real Jane Austen
In this revisionist biography, Austen—“the unshockable young Jane”—more strongly resembles Emma Woodhouse than Fanny Price. She was opinionated and partial to crude humor. No material, from miscarriage...
View ArticleThe Pretty One
“What if her sisters saw her as a failure?” Pia, the second of three daughters and the titular pretty one, wonders, but the thought might easily have occurred to any of the Hellinger sisters in this...
View ArticleFlimsy Little Plastic Miracles
This novel-as-memoir quotes the last line of the author’s first novel (“the one nobody read”): “ ‘Anything, anything, anything is possible.’ ” Anything does seem possible in Currie’s fantastical...
View ArticleHonor
The sweeping title of this multigenerational novel refers to honor killing—a woman’s murder at the hands of her relatives or with their approval. Shafak follows a family’s journey from a small Kurdish...
View ArticleMo Said She Was Quirky
“Mo said she was quirky but it was more than quirky.” “She” is Helen, a struggling single mother and casino worker living in London, and the guiding force in this stream-of-consciousness novel. On the...
View ArticleThe Mothers
Told in the voice of Jesse, a cancer survivor who has learned that she’s infertile, this engaging novel about a Brooklyn couple’s struggle to adopt a child maintains a playful tone even when dealing...
View ArticleThe Interestings
This sprawling novel spans more than thirty years in the lives of a group of friends who meet at a summer camp in the mid-seventies. The teen-agers call themselves the Interestings; among them is the...
View ArticleThe Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
This engaging début novel features many affairs but very little love. We watch from behind our hands as Nate, a New York writer enjoying recent literary success, gallivants about the city’s...
View ArticleThe Girl Who Loved Camellias
The great French courtesan Marie Duplessis was muse to Alexandre Dumas fils and Franz Liszt, and, via Dumas, Verdi’s inspiration for “La Traviata.” Fleeing a dreadful childhood in Normandy, Duplessis...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
My Education, by Susan Choi (Viking). In Choi’s fourth novel, Regina Gottlieb, a young graduate student, is drawn to an eccentric and physically beautiful professor with a reputation for carrying on...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese).“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story....
View ArticleBriefly Noted
Someone, by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). McDermott’s seventh novel is a remarkable portrait of an unremarkable life. Marie has grown up the child of Irish immigrants in working-class...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
On Paper, by Nicholas A. Basbanes (Knopf). This buoyant, encyclopedic history celebrates paper in all its forms. Basbanes, a former investigative journalist, goes to China, where paper was invented,...
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