David Eggers’s fiction debut “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” falls staggeringly short of the high mark set by his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In “Genius,” Eggers…
In the summers of my youth, I devoured my father’s old children’s books. Among these was a collection of historical novels from the 1950s, each with the more unsavory details…
Writing about depression is a perilous practice. The temptation in seeking to realistically depict what Macbeth calls “the petty pace” of life for depressed people, the agonizing succession of empty…
Kathryn Harrison’s most recent novel is a finely detailed if somewhat dull historical fiction that considers the development of one man’s character in the context of developing scientific technology. In…
The award-winning Swedish novel April Witch is the dark and powerful tale of Desirée, a severely disabled woman abandoned at birth by her mother to spend her entire life in…
“My mother keeps every key to her house on a ring attached to her bag,” says seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Thea early in Lynn Freed’s beautifully told fifth novel, House of Women .…
Meera Nair’s first book, Video , is a collection of ten short stories with a wide range of settings and protagonists. She moves from a small Indian village to Phoenix,…
In the preface to The Black Veil, Moody writes that the “book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative,” clarifying his description of…
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…
Peter Ibbetson