A shared love for a particular novel can bridge the most surprising social gaps
“Novels aren’t just sources of solitary cogitation. They are social objects, and we use them to brandish our identities, mark our allegiances and broker our relationships. They can provoke passions as strongly as politics. Thanks to the intimate connection between story and [...]
The anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This is an idea that finally solidified in my mind while enjoying Captain Paul K. Chappell’s succinct and very important book WILL WAR EVER END? A Soldier’s Vision [...]
The five stories of “Music and Nightfall” contained in Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro display Ishiguro’s virtuosity in creating fiction that is both illuminating and pleasurable. Reading his works is always an experience of multiple satisfactions — characters, landscape, plot — and the themes he explores are consistently brought to a new place of examination and [...]
The Child In Time might just be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel. In it, children’s book author Stephen must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death while ironically being assigned to serve on a Parliamentary commission on child care. Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife, a [...]
If Henry James and Margaret Attwood could have a literary child, it might be Hilary Thayer Hamann. Evoking James’ Portrait of a Lady or Daisy Miller, and Atwood’s Surfacing, Hamann’s debut novel Anthropology of an American Girl poetically, and brutally, follows the seemingly ordinary but at once riveting life of narrator and protagonist Evaline with [...]
Three Days Before the Shooting, The Unfinished Second Novel by Ralph Ellison is magnificent. It is magnificent for its plot and characters, for its words, and for Ellison’s fearless grappling with themes of race, identity, fate, responsibility, and the promise of the American dream. This edition put out by Random House and edited by John [...]
Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman is an extraordinary novel for its voice, its vision, and its promise. The voice is that of Abraham Singleton, born to a thirteen-year old girl and an absent twenty-year old father; the year is 1982 America and the place is the projects, Ever Park building in Queens, New [...]
I have always thought of Summer Brenner as a poet who sometimes writes fiction, so I was surprised to see in the front matter to I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, that Brenner has published six novels to just two volumes of verse, and that she hasn’t published a book of poems in [...]
Ralph Truitt has lead a hard life with a father who is more interested in raising an heir to his fortune than a son and a mother is a religious zealot who makes it clear that she does not love him. Nothing since then has served to make him a happier person. So, as this [...]
Ruins by Achy Obejas is a beautifully written novel, an incredibly humanistic portrayal of one man’s life in Cuba. Born before the Cuban revolution, and named after the U.S. Navy ships his mother can see from shore close to Guantanamo (a U.S. base already there since 1898), Usnavy is destined to live a life under [...]
I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just [...]