Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific writer, has a very distinctive style and her books address societal issues in a consistent and often disturbing manner. Her story lines usually address issues of gender inequality, include some sort of sexual impropriety and the lead character frequently devolves into mental illness. These are the JCO constants which revolve
Every so often you read a book that is just a puzzler. It was good; it was bad; it was everything in between. I just cannot make up my mind. That is how I feel about Paul Murray’s “The Mark and the Void.” Ireland’s fictional approximation of The Big Short, it has elements of reality
“Mrs. Engels”, a first novel by Gavin McCrea, is a fictional account of a three year period (1870-1873)(as well as some flashbacks) in the lives of the authors of the Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), told from the perspective of Friedrich Engels’ wife, Lizzie Burns.
Lizzie and her sister, Mary, Irish by
Anna Quindlen’s “Miller’s Valley” is Mimi Miller’s reminiscence of the more than 10 year period in her life when the federal government was planning to move a dam and flood her home town of Miller’s Valley. The story relays the expected emotional opposition to loss of home and place, but along the way it touches
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“[H]e was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable… They all…sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, someone to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.” This is Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”.
“A
“Wind/Pinball” is the 2015 translation and American publication of Haruki Murakami’s first two novels, written in the late 1970s. Both novels are very short and the book is preceded by a wonderful author’s note about how he became a writer. If you are a Murakami fan, you will recognize the magical realism, existential, and spiritual
Have you ever wondered how the mind of someone different from you works and what the person might be thinking and feeling? That is exactly the insight that Eli Gottlieb provides when he gives you a glimpse into the mind of an autistic man, Todd Aaron, in “Best Boy.”
We first meet Todd
I just finished reading Bill Clegg’s “Did You Ever Have A Family”, a novel about loss, grief, regret and sorrow. It revolves around June Reid and the death of four people in a house explosion and the subsequent impact on the lives of their surviving families and the people they touched. It does not
In Laura Groff’s “Fates and Furies”, beginnings and endings combine in a character rich story about life, love and loss. Lancelot Satterwhite (Lotto), is born into a loving and wealthy family in sunny Florida, tied to his religiously zealous mother and his kind, mild mannered father. Lotto “would have been bright, ordinary if his
Margaret Atwood’s latest, “The Heart Goes Last”, is so funny, and so scary at the same time that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was done. At the start, we meet Stan and Charmaine, a recently married, once happy couple, now destitute, and living in their car. The backdrop is