Graceling, by Kristin Cashore
Kristin Cashore’s debut novel Graceling is an engaging, action-driven fantasy that will please young adult and adult readers alike. In the Seven Kingdoms, some people are born with skills called...
View ArticleFriendly Fire, by A.B. Yehoshua
A.B. Yehoshua never writes the shortcut phrase “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in Friendly Fire (Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 2008), his most recent novel, newly translated into English from Hebrew. It’s...
View Article[Reviewlet] The Artist of Disappearance, by Anita Desai
Until recently, we have lived in an age of exceptionalism. Idols and Stars and the Talented, voted into fame by a nation of cell-wielding aspirants. But the tide has shifted. Ninety-nine percent no...
View ArticleThe Sounds of the River – A Lost Anthology (Folk Devil Records)
The following piece — a fictional review of an imaginary anthology of songs about the Rua river — was removed from the novel The River and Enoch O’Reilly at the draft stage. I always liked the piece,...
View ArticleBook of the Week: The River and Enoch O’Reilly
This week’s feature is Peter Murphy’s new novel, The River and Enoch O’Reilly, which was published this week by Mariner Books. Murphy is a writer from Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, Ireland. His first...
View ArticleThe Pure Gold Baby, by Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble’s seventeenth novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), appears after a nine-year hiatus; the author declared after completing The Red Queen (Harcourt, 2004) that she...
View ArticleTo a Land that I Will Show You: On Kenneth Bonert’s The Lion Seeker
To a Land that I Will Show You: On Kenneth Bonert’s The Lion Seeker Recently, I attended a Friday-night discussion about African immigration to Israel with a group of young Jews. We sat on the floor at...
View ArticleTo a Land that I Will Show You: On Kenneth Bonert’s The Lion Seeker
Recently, I attended a Friday-night discussion about African immigration to Israel with a group of young Jews. We sat on the floor at a Brooklyn synagogue and ate from paper plates of rice and...
View ArticleWriting the Novel You Don’t Want to Write
Decades ago, when I was in college, I had a writing teacher who told his students to “write the novel you want to read.” I’ve been trying to follow this advice for almost forty years now, but it’s not...
View ArticleAnxieties of Representation: An Interview with Peter Ho Davies
Back in Equal Love (2000), Peter Ho Davies offered up his guide for the dislocated, “How to Be an Expatriate.” Here’s a typical passage: At Thanksgiving, call your parents and tell them, “It’s...
View ArticleTremors in the Background: Talking with Andrew Michael Hurley
Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut novel, The Loney, was first published in the UK in 2014 in an edition of under three hundred copies. Yet proving the old adage that you can’t keep a good book down, it was...
View ArticleNothing Is Free: Robert Stone’s Fun with Problems
Last year, about this time, I began reading the works of Robert Stone to prepare for reviewing Child of Light, Madison Smartt Bell’s new biography of the author. Covid was descending upon us: the sense...
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