By turns both lovely and frustrating, Alice Munro’s book of nine new stories, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, offers a realistic window into life’s misfortunes and truths, its delicate moments…
Half a Life plunges the reader into the middle of a story and ends, half a life distant, at the beginning of another. V. S. Naipaul continues the boundary-exploring work…
People invent stories to defend or promote themselves, to entertain or challenge or plead with their audience, to offer some vision of the world as it should be, and to…
Sadly, it is one of the curses of their trade that great novelists often lead lives that resemble bad novels. Like a romance novel or a mystery, the literary pantheon…
Since the birth of his mentally handicapped son Hikari more than 30 years ago, Kenzaburo Oe has often drawn on the challenge of raising the boy for literary inspiration. Several…
Anthony Doerr likes to list. It’s a style that becomes quickly apparent in the first few stories of The Shell Collector and then continues throughout his collection. Sometimes the lists…
While the name Orhan Pamuk may not currently arouse great interest in American literary circles, his Turkish compatriots recognize him as one of their nation’s most important thinkers. His work…
“Life goes on. One way or another everyone gets left alone,” is the prescriptive claim of The Same Sea, stated with a tone of resignation. There is little indignation in…
Conscious and Verbal: Poems 1996-2000 signals a change in the verses of poet Les Murray. While traces of the man known for his rugged, political poems can still be found,…
Manil Suri’s first novel, The Death of Vishnu, is a mélange of social commentary, romance-novel lust, the mundane, the comic, and the unbelievable. Blending fantasy and reality, the author focuses…
Peter Ibbetson