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 [...]
July 14, 2009
February 14, 2010
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 [...]
December 7, 2009
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 [...]
October 24, 2009
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 [...]
August 21, 2009
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 [...]
July 23, 2009
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 [...]
July 6, 2009
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 [...]
July 4, 2009
Miriam Gershow’s debut novel, The Local News, is an excellent story narrated by 15 year old Lydia Pasternak, whose older brother Danny has mysteriously gone missing after shooting hoops with a couple of friends at the local elementary school.
Lydia doesn’t exactly miss her brother right away. Her feelings are complicated. Danny and his football playing [...]
June 19, 2009
The Beauty of the Hedgehog
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a great book. This beautiful, moving, and occasionally very funny novel tells the story of an amazing woman and a startling young girl, and their parallel and eventually joined paths to recognition of beauty, in the self and in the world.
Renee is [...]
June 13, 2009
I am constantly surprised by the knowledge books provide, the way they let you experience and imagine things that could never have been possible otherwise. The way they tell stories that surprise, horrify or humble you. Mommy I’m Still in Here is one such story. As the tag line says ‘It is the story of [...]