Beauty is Frederick Dillen’s new novel and in it we meet Carol McLean, who spent her teen years helping neighborhood boys find parts for their beat-up cars but grows up to work for a private equity firm that buys companies only to sell their parts. She is the go-to person for these company shut downs, known as an undertaker, for coming in and laying off all staff and ... Read More...
The Anatomy Lesson
Aris Kindt was not necessarily a bad man but he was a thief. For every town where he was caught he was whipped and branded so his torso and neck told the painful history of his life. It isn’t until he returns to Amsterdam and is caught stealing a burgher’s fine coat that he is not only whipped but then has his hand amputated. Shortly after this, he is condemned to hang—an ... Read More...
The Blazing World
Sometimes all it takes is a name and the die is cast. For Harriet Burden, the fact that her father called her Harry from a young age felt like a challenge; one that she grabs onto with all the tenacity of a pit bull, even when it causes her nothing but pain. Harriet is the protagonist in Siri Hustvedt’s new novel, The Blazing World, a tour-de-force of one woman’s determination ... Read More...
Kinder Than Solitude
A trio of friends haunted by a mysterious accident are the key characters in Yiyun Li’s new novel, Kinder Than Solitude. They all live within the same housing compound in Beijing, where life moves along without much disturbance, until an older girl living in one of their houses is overcome by a mysterious illness that later turns out to be chemical poisoning. She is not ... Read More...
Fallen Beauty
Fallen Beauty is the story of a lovely young woman, Laura Kelley, who pays the price for one night of passion by becoming pregnant. It’s 1928 in upstate New York and her decision to keep her child, despite the father’s unwillingness to acknowledge her, changes the course of her life. Both her parents are dead and so, at age nineteen, she is left to run their dress shop alone ... Read More...
The Headmaster’s Wife
Some books are written with the intent to stun a reader with surprise and don’t offer much beyond that. Others, like The Headmaster's Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene, use the surprise (the double surprise, even) as a jumping off point to much deeper issues. It is also a life lesson, one that I failed, because I jumped without thought into the novel’s initial trope of a ... Read More...
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