The London Train – Tessa Hadley
Each character struggles with the existential questions they find themselves forced into: being only children and losing a parent; facing romantic commitments and romantic upheavals; finding themselves with children or childless.
Daughters of the Revolution – Carolyn Cooke
This novel brought back a nostalgic draft of the feeling I associate with discovering literature, when reading was a process of constant blossoming, feeling like my mind was being tended by the deceptively gentle hand of a master of immense talent and wisdom. It’s not a feeling I have very often as an adult reader, and it’s a gift.
My New American Life – Francine Prose
Francine Prose’s latest novel of near-realism, My New American Life, chronicles its heroine Lula’s attempts to find her niche as an Albanian immigrant in a land of dreams: New Jersey.
Ten Thousand Saints – Eleanor Henderson
The book is less hagiography than Peter Pan, a band of orphans fighting their own way through a land of make-believe
The Great Night – Chris Adrian
Chris Adrian’s new novel THE GREAT NIGHT is a lively dramatization of the grief that attends love and its loss and the complicated ties that bind the present to the past.
It’s telling that the gut reactions of my friends who formulate an opinion on the work after only seeing the title and a few pages match up (sometimes verbatim) with Brown’s depiction of his friends, who have been privy to his lifestyle for years.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial – Janet Malcolm
If criminal law is a set of competing narratives that succeed or fail on the strength of their storytelling, Malcolm both identifies with and transcends the methods of the court room—she shows the human identity of the impersonal law, the fragility and foibles of its practitioners and the mercenary power of its effect.
The Tao of Travel – Paul Theroux
At sixteen I traveled to England with my family, bringing an SAT workbook, a five pound dumbbell, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in my overstuffed suitcase. The only useful item of this set was the novel, the lightest and most logical item. On a trip, even a great trip, escape is necessary, and an immersive book is the best medium.
Day of the Oprichnik – Vladimir Sorokin
The atrocities of Sorokin’s dystopia are sparked not by futuristic weapons or surveillance devices but by good old-fashioned human nature.
Walking to Hollywood – Will Self
How uncomfortable is it when you sense that someone is appropriating obsolete forms of rebellion?