Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is one of my favorite books. Her combination of magical and realism makes for poetic, moving reading. Last month her newest book of short stories, The Color Master, came out, and it shimmers with its ability to be both fantastical and utterly human. In “The Doctor and the Rabbi” Bender takes what sounds like the opening ... Read More...
Mrs. Poe
Mrs. Poe is author Lynn Cullen’s fictional look at the relationship between American poet Frances Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe, told from Osgood’s point of view. The novel opens in Manhattan with Osgood trying to sell some of her poetry, as her portrait painter husband has abandoned her and their two daughters for a wealthy divorcée. Despite her husband’s disappearance (which ... Read More...
Mother Mother
Koren Zailckas doesn’t waste any time. In her first novel Mother, Mother: A Novel she takes no more than one hundred pages to pull the mask off Josephine Hurst, a woman who believes she is the pinnacle of modern motherhood—raising two lovely daughters (one destined for Broadway) and a son so gifted she has to home school him. Whether this is true or not seems beside the point ... Read More...
The Sleep Room
There is nothing more frightening than that which cannot be identified, no engine of fear more powerful than the unknown. It is 1955 and the psychiatric field is making its first foray into sleep as a treatment for extreme mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar. Dr. James Richardson has been studying the field and written a paper about it when he is summoned ... Read More...
The Hive
There is no shortage of mommy-lit in the world. There are stories (fiction and non-fiction) about nannies, schools, and mothers who work pitted against those who don’t. What is new is Gill Hornby’s debut novel, The Hive, which looks at the uber-competitive world of elementary school from the British mummy’s perspective. St. Ambrose is a school and community that prides ... Read More...
Enon
They are a young couple who had a single child young and who lost the child in an instant of combustion and are straggling around their home in shock at the child’s death but nonetheless trying to spare each other in at least some slight degree the full blow of the end of their fragile marriage by acting as if it isn’t the end for just a little longer, by spreading the blow ... Read More...
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 227
- 228
- 229
- 230
- 231
- …
- 258
- Next Page »
