HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD C Pam Zhang juxtaposes nightmare with dream in her novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Her
Juggling past, present and future while telling a story through the eyes of a single narrator is no easy task. Anton DiSclafani manages with exceptional
THE GOOD LORD BIRD It’s not any wonder that James McBride’s latest book, The Good Lord Bird won the 2013 National Book Award, and I
The Bartender’s Tale, recalled by his son. Ivan Doig’s novels, like The Bartender’s Tale, circle around themselves, like a helix coiling both inward and out.
God’s Hotel A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine During a conversation about health care being more businesslike than
JACK 1939 Imagine young Jack Kennedy as a spy, commandeered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to innocuously roam Europe and uncover nefarious warmongering
SWEET THUNDER Ivan Doig’s Sweet Thunder follows one of the characters from his earlier novel, The Whistling Season, into maturity. Perhaps you’ll remember him as
Night Watch presents an intricate literary puzzle, where multiple characters and their lives interlock together, creating an unexpected back-lit photograph of London in the 1940s.
Countless late nineteenth-century French novels, paintings and sculptures grew out of a powerful philosophy often called scientific determinism or literary naturalism. Writing of the artistic
A novel of neuroses, The Girl on the Train will drive a sane reader mad. Paula Hawkins has created three psychologically damaged women to tell
The Hours Count Samuel Taylor Coleridge once decreed the necessity of a “willing suspension of disbelief” when reading fantastical literature, especially poetry like his own.
The Paying Guests Sarah Waters’ NeoGothic ingenuity astonishes me. With every novel she writes, she tweaks my inner Charlotte Bronte, my inner Emily Bronte, my
Reputations In this dizzy political season, fiction about an artistic facet of political commentary provides a refreshing change from television’s punditry. Reputations, by Colombian author
THE AFTER PARTY Anton DiSclafani writes intriguingly insightful novels about young women who have more money than good sense. I reviewed her first such narrative,
FATES AND FURIES In Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff proposes a unique way of looking at a relationship. The first half of Fates and Furies, titled
Agnostic, A Spirited Manifesto. Something to believe in, or not. Can there be an agnostic Christian, agnostic Buddhist, agnostic Jew, or an agnostic Catholic? (Yes,
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