Little girls are all sugar and spice and everything nice. So what does it mean when they see things other people can’t? And talk to their dolls with a secret language? In Jennifer McMahon’s new novel, The Winter People, it means a whole lot of creepy is coming on. The novel opens with nine-year-old Sara seeing a friend running through the forest near her home in West Hall, ... Read More...
The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress
In a clever move, the title of The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress describes the three main characters in the book, eliminating any need for the reader to figure out what the novel is about. There is Stella, the socialite long-suffering wife of Judge Crater who doesn’t seem overwhelmingly concerned when he disappears, only when she finds out his paychecks are going to stop. ... Read More...
Belle Cora
I know a man who had a colossal stone mansion dismantled to be taken by sea from New York to California, with every block labeled and numbered so that the house could be reassembled at its destination. Whenever in my life I have moved a great distance to a new place and new circumstances, I have felt like that house. I seem to have spent some time in pieces, waiting for ... Read More...
The Color Master
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...
Chris Bohjalian Interview
On Monday I reviewed Chris Bohjalian’s new book, The Light in the Ruins. He is the critically acclaimed author of sixteen novels, several of which are my all-time favorites. He is also a genial and kind person, willing to take some of his personal time before his book tour starts to answer my questions. He’s been interviewed hundreds of times so he’s been asked just about ... Read More...
The Light in the Ruins
The Light in the Ruins, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, is set at the Villa Chimera in Tuscany in 1943, a pastoral estate where the war is largely unseen. The Rosatis are a titled Italian family and while they have one son preparing for the Allied invasion in Sicily and another who works at a museum trying to control the flow of Italian art out of the country, their lives ... Read More...
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