“We are chased by things done to us in this life…We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops, it’s gone.”
LaRose, by Louise Erdrich, is a story
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
It seems as though there have been a lot of first novels lately; maybe there always have been and I have just been oblivious. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer”, winner of the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction, is a good one, so long as you do not mind vivid descriptions of
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
Every year it seems there are innumerable new novels that take place in London during the blitz of World War II. And of course while I cannot claim to have read all of them, I always wonder how any single one can have anything new or fresh to say. Chris Cleave’s “Everyone Brave is Forgiven,”
Memoirs can be great or awful. Sometimes a memoir is nothing more than an author’s musings about some specific event in his or her life, with little to offer the reader beyond the author’s singular self-absorbed experience. Too much “me” and very little “why should I care?” That said, I have just read the second
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