Fiction
BREAKING THE MOLD
In Helene Wecker’s first novel, two more than usually disoriented foreigners emerge onto the streets of 1899 New York. One is a golem, a clay woman fashioned near Danzig, then shipped across the ocean as the wife of a man who inconveniently dies on the voyage...more
ABERRATIONS AND APPARITIONS
Here’s a paragraph you might find a little strange: “Micah had ridden three times, got thrown once. He found horses hard to read. Their thoughts might go back to the beginning of horse time, or they might be afraid of a candy wrapper on the ground...more
LOVE ME. LEAVE ME ALONE.
Loneliness can be divided into two types: transient and chronic. The first is more common than the second, meaning most people feel lonely sometimes and some people feel lonely most of the time. Transients aren’t interesting. Like hunger or fatigue, their loneliness comes and goes and isn’t defining: talk to them for an hour and they forget it...more
ARE YOU MY FATHER?
At a party in 1960s Manhattan, a beautiful blonde named Constance meets a professor of poetry many years her senior. After a brief and not especially rigorous courtship, she agrees to become his wife. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this psychologically fragile young woman – whose emotional and sexual frigidity is strongly signposted right from the start – seems trapped and unhappy, resisting her husband’s apparently good-hearted attempts to make her feel loved and secure...more
REGRETS ONLY
What does it mean to say “I’m sorry”? Increasingly, in this age of ceremonial, highly ritualized apology, it’s hard to distinguish between true remorse and savvy public relations. Jonathan Dee’s sixth novel, “A Thousand Pardons,” was written before Lance Armstrong’s public shaming, but it speaks to something similar in the zeitgeist: the idea of confession as business strategy...more
THE GRADUATE
Pop quiz: you are writing an insightful, strange, funny and dark investigation into a family of four coming together for the younger daughter’s high school graduation. Who will be your point-of-view character? Is it (a) the vapid, sensual, self-centered mother, who arrives on the doorstep after an absence of three years, during which she didn’t so much as call; (b) Hofmeester, the pathologically striving, conventional father, who considers emotions a disease; (c) Tirza, the younger daughter, pampered, beloved and in her first bloom, heading off to Africa with her Moroccan boyfriend to get a taste of the real world; or (d) Ibi, the estranged, brooding older daughter – a hotelier in France, and thus a failure in her father’s eyes – whose deep-seated distrust brings her unusual clarity? Arnon Grunberg’s answer in “Tirza,” surprisingly, is (b), the father...more
LATE BLOOMERS
From the knowing grandmother in the novel “Tending to Virginia” to the failing mother stressing out her daughter in the short story “Going Away Shoes,” elderly characters have always played their parts in Jill McCorkle’s small-town, intergenerational fiction...more
LE CARRE'S LATEST
“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” George Smiley said in John le Carre’s 1974 classic, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” â(euro) “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the center of things...more
TAXI DRIVER
There’s nothing like a college campus in summer. It’s peaceful. You feel as if you finally own the place, as if you belong. The classrooms are empty, and you can wander the hallways alone. The undergraduates are gone, the professors traveling or holed up in their offices; a handful of shy grad students, the trees and grass, the fountains and libraries take over...more
CRACKED
Angels do in fact walk among us, and they are not at all to be trifled with. Or at least that’s the alarming state of affairs at the heart of Danielle Trussoni’s 2010 best-selling novel, “Angelology.” Called Nephilim, these angels – or, more properly, angel-human hybrids – are the descendants of traitorous, fallen rebel angels...more
AGAINST TYRANNY
Every city offers residents a way to chart the well-being of their surroundings. For the Albanian city of Gjirokaster, as depicted in Ismail Kadare’s tragicomic novel “The Fall of the Stone City,” a misperceived rivalry between doctors becomes a barometer to assess the political gales that battered Eastern Europe during World War II and the cold war...more
DEAR LIFE
A good owner’s manual takes the unexpected into account; the more extreme the eventuality the better. In the same spirit, “A Guide to Being Born,” by Ramona Ausubel, the author of “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” deals with the desolation and surreptitious thrills that come to us through ownership of a body and its accompanying life...more
REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE
In “The Flamethrowers,” her frequently dazzling second novel, Rachel Kushner thrusts us into the white-hot center of the 1970s conceptual art world, motorcycle racing, upper-class Italy and the rampant kidnappings and terrorism that plagued it...more
IN THE HEIGHTS
George Mallory, like Robert Falcon Scott, has departed the ranks of mere humanity and entered British consciousness as a Galahad of the snows, a titan who showed what a chap can do if he’s made of the right stuff. It’s fertile material for fictional recasting, and in her first novel Tanis Rideout adds a twist to the tale while making it entirely her own...more
SIBLING RIVALS
Stories of marital relations – strained, destroyed or restored – surely take up a larger section of our fiction shelves than stories of brothers and sisters. Yet why should that be, given the deep imprint siblings can make? Staying intimate with one’s spouse is a challenge, certainly, but the problems posed by a difficult brother or sister can be just as painful...more
A CHANGED MAN
It’s been almost 35 years since the publication of James Salter’s previous novel, “Solo Faces.” In the meantime, he’s written two volumes of stories and one of poetry, a memoir, a collection of travel essays and, with his wife, Kay Eldredge Salter, a book about food...more
WHERE'S THE BABY?
In 1991, Kathryn Harrison published “Thicker Than Water,” a novel about a young woman struggling to come to terms with the sexual relationship she’d had with her father. Three books later, she published “The Kiss,” a memoir in which she examined, in excruciating detail, the sexual relationship she’d had with her father...more
Non-Fiction
BIG DATA IS WATCHING YOU
How can you resist a book whose first chapter begins: “Have you ever peeked inside a friend’s trash can? I have.” Trash is like “one’s sex life,” the book continues, “the less said about it, the better.” Yet the Internet can convert this private affair into an object of public surveillance, and Evgeny Morozov tells you how...more
Children's
THE PLAYING'S THE THING
Leopold Mozart shuttled Wolfgang Amadeus around Europe for years, parading his son in front of endless royalty to secure commissions and performances. More than two centuries later, a bullying stage father helped propel the Chinese pianist Lang Lang to superstardom...more
THE ONE LEAST LIKELY
There’s always a boy, and there’s always a girl. They may not like each other at first, but they find a way to work together. Friendship always blossoms, sometimes romance. There’s a society they have to fight against and a secret to uncover that changes the world...more
© The New York Times 2013
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