George Saunders Re-Imagines A President's Grief With 'Lincoln In The Bardo'
Willie Lincoln was only 11 when he died in February 1862 of typhoid fever. The Lincolns' third son was said to be their favorite, and after Willie was interred in a borrowed mausoleum in Oak Hill...
View Article'Ghachar Ghochar' Presents A Fretful Vision Of Indian Class Anxiety
It's been almost 20 years since Barbara Ehrenreich published Fear of Falling, her brilliant book on the anxious "inner life" of the American middle class. The book's title, "fear of falling," has...
View ArticleA Fatal Hit-And-Run Leads To A Collision Of Cultures In 'Waking Lions'
Worlds collide in Waking Lions, a new novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Like Tom Wolfe, who used the device of a hit-and-run accident in The Bonfire of the Vanities as a means to violently...
View ArticleRefugees Are Turned Back And A Rembrandt Goes Missing In Suspenseful 'Heretics'
You might say that Heretics, a sprawling novel by celebrated Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, has been in the works since the early 1990s. It was back then that Padura began writing a series of books...
View ArticleSmart, Satirical 'Devil And Webster' Takes On College Identity Politics
A few days ago, one of my students asked me what I was reading, so I told her about Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel, called The Devil and Webster. My student's eyes got wider as I finished lightly...
View Article'One Of The Boys' Tells The Story Of A Corrosive Father-Son Relationship
I was in the mood for reading "lite" this week. It was a nice fleeting thought. Instead, I took a detour because I got curious about Daniel Magariel's slim debut novel, One of the Boys, which is...
View Article'Hourglass' Exposes The Fissures That Develop In A Long-Term Marriage
Dani Shapiro's new memoir, Hourglass, opens on a scene from a marriage: On a winter's day, Shapiro looks out a window of her old house in Connecticut, and spots her husband. Now pushing 60, he is...
View Article'Anything Is Possible' Explores The Unquiet Depths Of Ordinary Lives
My timing has always been a little off with Elizabeth Strout. I've read and pretty much admired everything she's written, but, for whatever reason, the books of hers I've picked to review have been the...
View Article'No One Can Pronounce My Name' Is A Charming Take On Loneliness And Connection
Rakesh Satyal's new novel checks off a lot of boxes, but its charm lies in the fact that it wears all of it various identities so lightly. This is an immigration story, a coming-out story and something...
View ArticleSearching For A Summer Escape? These 6 Books Will Carry You Away
Journeys — near and far, into the past and even into near space — are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up my summer reading list. Here are six books to escape with:...
View Article2 Families Cruise Toward Catastrophe In 'Do Not Become Alarmed'
The title of Maile Meloy's new novel is misleading: Do Not Become Alarmed sounds like a suspense story. Granted, I did read it in two nights; but, while I'm a unapologetic fan of thrillers, Meloy's...
View Article'Golden Hill' Recalls The Dark Alleys And Twisted Virtue Of 18th-Century NYC
Ever since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Native Americans, New York City's character has been defined by money and con artistry. So it is that classic New York stories are always...
View Article2 Smart New Novels Find Humor In Fantasies Of Escape
A year-long getaway to a Greek island; a week by the sea at an arts colony. Fantasies of escape are the common premise of two new comic novels, both smart and sprightly in style, and both informed by a...
View ArticleNew Chester Himes Biography Reveals A Life As Wild As Any Detective Story
Most readers these days who know Chester Himes know him for his detective fiction, novels like The Real Cool Killers and Cotton Comes to Harlem , which were written late in his career during the 1950s...
View Article'What She Ate' Reveals The Plates And Palates Of 6 Notable Women
Back in the late 1980s, when I was first starting out as a critic for The Village Voice , one of the books I was assigned was Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, a social history of the home economics...
View Article'Monkey Selfie' Lawsuit Ends With Settlement Between PETA, Photographer
Back in 2011, Naruto was just an anonymous macaque in the jungles of Indonesia. On one particular day, however, the photogenic primate happened upon a wildlife photographer's camera and snapped a...
View ArticleAdolescent Friendship Fades Away In Claire Messud's Gothic 'Burning Girl'
About halfway through Claire Messud's new novel The Burning Girl , our narrator, a 12-year-old girl named Julia, makes this pronouncement: Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about...
View ArticleNovel 'Forest Dark' And Dog Book 'Afterglow' Consider The Meaning Of Life
Fall is when the publishing industry gets serious, when it leaves beach books in the sand and turns to weightier topics. And what could be weightier than the greatest question of all: the meaning of...
View ArticleJennifer Egan's 'Manhattan Beach' Is A Gorgeous Tribute To NYC And Its Seaport
So many great writers have given us so many great quotes in an attempt to capture New York, but I think my favorite is by the legendary New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling: "Before it was anything else,"...
View ArticleCollection Puts A Playful, Pulpy Twist On Preposterous Stories About Obama
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