I felt I could hold on to more by staying here. If I’d gone off…I’m not sure I would have known who I was. I would have come apart perhaps. Even if it doesn’t come to you right away, the name Havisham is likely to bring at least a flicker of recognition to a reading brain. It’s the surname of the epitome of love jilted at the altar, Catherine Havisham in Great ... Read More...
We Are Water: A Novel
How a work can be solid and delicate, earthy and of air is a mystery but describes Wally Lamb’s novel, We Are Water. Ostensibly it is the story of Annie Oh—wife, mother, artist and keeper of secrets, secrets that grow and beget other secrets, changing her life and the lives around her. When she is only five, she watches as her mother is swept away by a flood, along with her ... Read More...
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt’s latest novel is The Goldfinch. Oh My. This is a B.I.G. book, figuratively (Tartt’s first novel in eleven years) and literally (weighing in at a dense 771 pages on paper that is as weighty and glossy as the words printed on it). Theo Decker and his mother live alone in NYC. The story begins with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum before a school appointment 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...
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...
Burial Rites
A young woman is condemned to death in Iceland at a time when there were no jails so a family is ordered to house her for her final months. A young priest is assigned to be her spiritual guide to repentance before her execution. All this in 1828 the summer before Agnes Magnúsdóttir is to be put to death in Hannah Kent’s debut novel, Burial Rites. Agnes has been mistreated her ... Read More...
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