It’s impossible for me not to draw comparisons between Joshua Ferris’ first novel, Then We Came To The End, and his second, The Unnamed. They struck me as so similar it’s almost as if The Unnamed is a slimmed down, repackaged “End,” which means the two novels share the same attributes and drawbacks. Unfortunately, The [...]

Novel Joshua Ferris

I keep a list of books it would be good for me, intellectually and culturally speaking, to read and call it (imaginatively) “Books I Should Read.” I am glad I’ve finished Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, not only because I can now cross it off that list, but because it was an engrossing story.
In Nickel [...]

Non-Fiction Barbara Ehrenreich

The biggest reason I like T.C. Boyle is that he’s just weird enough.
Too often, authors concoct characters so strange or extreme they seem just like what they are – fiction. Wild Child, Boyle’s most recent collection of short stories, displays his knack for giving the reader characters ordinary enough to be relatable, yet unusual enough [...]

Short Stories TC Boyle

Provenance is a book that succeeds on its story – which is good, because stylistically it doesn’t have a lot else going for it.
A nonfiction account of one of the greatest scams in recent history, Provenance chronicles the exploits of con artist John Drewe, who swindled some of the biggest fixtures of the British modern [...]

Non-Fiction Aly Sujo, Art, Laney Salisbury

Lorrie Moore is a writer of exceptional quality. But a storyteller, a master of plot, she is not.
Moore’s novel A Gate At The Stairs has some of the finest and most expressive passages I’ve read lately. Her descriptions are unusual but devastatingly precise – a one-two punch few can accomplish. Take this, her description of [...]

Novel Lorrie Moore

By all accounts, I should have really liked Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves. That makes the fact that it’s a wretched failure all the more disappointing.
The Swan Thieve, Kostova’s second novel, begins with the admission of Robert Oliver, a painter of some renown, to the psychiatric care of Andrew Marlow. Oliver had been committed [...]

Novel AS Byatt, Audrey Niffenegger, Dan Brown, Elizabeth Kostova

My 2010 Year in Books is off to a good start with Jonathan Lethem’s witty, sparkling Chronic City.
Chase Insteadman, a blandly handsome former child star, has been drifting through Manhattan’s social scene for years, blissfully insulated from reality by the never-ending array of galas and an endless stream of residual checks from his former sitcom. [...]

Novel Jonathan Lethem

I’ll say this for Audrey Niffenegger; she’s got courage.
The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s novel about the relationship between a mortal woman and an involuntary time traveler, goes so far beyond cliché it circles back and heads into original territory. In concocting this book, Niffenegger clearly was not afraid of the difficulties inherent in fording into [...]

Novel Audrey Niffenegger, romance

1. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey: I love stories that create a sense of place, so this anthology of 50 essays by 50 authors, each about his or her own state, was a jackpot. Every three or four pages, you get a completely different tone and [...]

Best of Annie Proulx, Bernard Schlink, Best Books of 2009, Donna Tarrt, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdich, Lynne Truss, Matt Weiland, Michael Chabon, Richard Holmes, Sarah Thornton, Sean Wilsey

I once read a review of a movie version of Anna Karenina that compared viewing the film to “watching beautiful animals moving behind thickly frosted glass.” At the time I wasn’t sure what that meant, but now, after reading Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, I think I have a better [...]

Short Stories Tobias Wolff