The Early Stories: 1953-1975 book by John Updike
Charles Degar
In his 1986 introduction to a set of Paris Review interviews, John Updike quoted Philip Roth: “What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book…
Fiction
The Hazards of Good Breeding book by Jessica Shattuck
Alison Brown
The English writer and literary critic G. K. Chesterton once said, “A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But…
War Talk by Arundhati Roy
Margaret Fox
War Talk by Arundhati Roy South End Press, 152 pp After winning the Booker Prize for her first and only novel The God of Small Things, Indian writer Arundhati Roy…
The Glass Palace book by Amitav Ghosh
Kirsti Potter
Amitav Ghosh occupies a rather curious place in the landscape of contemporary English-language authors from the Indian subcontinent. At fifty-five years of age, he can’t be classed with the younger…
Tyrone Evans Clark’s Grapefruit: Season I – The Wrath of Love
Peter Ibbetson
In 1700s New Zealand an old woman begs for food in an impoverished South Auckland with nothing to give her. Eventually, a beautiful young woman hands her a grapefruit. The…
Political Fictions book by Joan Didion
Something about Joan Didion’s writing makes me almost believe every word. She’s so acridly disarming, so apparently prescient in her observations on American political life that I found myself doubting…
Rules of Engagement book by Anita Brookner
In response to Anita Brookner’s third novel, critic Caryn James referred to what had at that point become “the predictable Anita Brookner heroine,” a stifled, passive woman resembling “a Victorian…
Written in Wood at Yale 200 book by Janet Stimson
Yale sociologist Janet Stimson’s new book, Written in Wood: Yale at 200, gives an insightful if sparse account of the university and New Haven at the turn of the 20th…
Sherlock Holmes
My Man Sherlock An admirer’s portrait of one of the greatest sleuths in literary history.By S. Kahn This a review of Sherlock Holme: Fiction and the Forms of Narrative commenced…
Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee Viking, 230 pp, $21.95 reviewed by Adam Eaker More philosophical meditation than novel, 2003 Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s newest book, Elizabeth Costello, is a tantalizing…