My Father Died Before I Could Say Goodbye
"I ran across the hall as soon as my sister woke me. But I had misheard. Daddy was not dying. Daddy was already dead. He was a ghoulish figure in pajamas, his mouth sunk-in like a person with no teeth, even though he had kept all his. His normally animated face was waxen, his twinkly blue eyes open and emptied. Not 12 hours earlier, he’d asked me to take care of forwarding the New Yorker to his cabin in Maine. He was planning to leave the following week to spend the summer there, as usual....
Memorizing and Memory: A Writer’s Estranged Cousins
"I stopped trusting my memory. Betrayed at age 14, I lost faith that anything would ever stick again. I saw my inability to memorize as a terrible weakness, and it haunted me....
'Cleanness' Revisits Familiar Ground, Beautifully
"Halfway through Garth Greenwell's exquisite story collection, Cleanness, the narrator and his boyfriend wander through a Bologna museum devoted to a single, unnamed artist. The narrator becomes transfixed by paintings "humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch." You don't need to have been to Bologna (I haven't) to recognize that Greenwell has discovered Giorgio Morandi, a twentieth century Italian painter whose small, haunting still lifes evoke mystery and wonder....
In 'Here We Are,' Heart-Rending Challenges Of Immigration Are Exposed
"Aarti Namdev Shahani reports on Silicon Valley for NPR. She's also the daughter of an immigrant who served time for a "felony." Her riveting memoir, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, recounts a story of personal success against the backdrop of her family's contorted, painful path to citizenship. Close-knit, they discovered the hard way that American justice is neither just nor colorblind....
'The Yellow House' Connects Place, Memory And Self-Knowledge
"Sarah M. Broom's gorgeous debut, The Yellow House, reads as elegy and prayer. ... [She] is a writer of great intellect and breadth. She embraces momentous subjects. The Yellow House is about the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard its members work; and our government's failure to protect its poor from predictable environmental catastrophe and subsequent trauma; and our gross neglect of poor neighborhoods; and sham promises that never materialize or are broken too easily, and the papering over of deep systemic problems by politicians and we the people. The Yellow House is also about the persistence of love and grit. There's a mother who never flags or fails to support her children....
'Idiot Wind' Tells A Personal Tale Of Journeying From Addiction To Recovery
"It's January 1987 in Greenwich Village and a wicked blizzard is blowing through town. Kaldheim is down and out, having hit rock bottom at age 37. He's burned through two wives, the second of whom died two years earlier from an aneurysm. Kaldheim is plagued with nightmares, drowning in shame that he didn't attend her funeral. He's on the run from his coke dealer, who doesn't suffer swindlers gladly. Catching the last bus out of New York, he finds himself headed for Richmond....
3 Sisters Come Of Age, Dreamily, In 'Three Summers'
"Three Summers, by Magarita Liberaki [1919-2001], weaves a dreamy, cinematic tapestry of Greek village life. Originally published in 1946, the novel has been reissued, translated by Karen Van Dyck. It's set in the countryside around Athens, "where all the gardens were." Over the titular three summers, three sisters come of age in their divorced mother's home, alongside a cast of colorful characters: "Spinster" Aunt Theresa, Grandfather, Rodia the maid, who imparts family secrets; Mr. Louzis, Mother's admirer; droves of hungry local boys; and Miltos, the girls' father, who lives in Athens....
'When We Were Arabs' Is A Nostalgic Celebration Of A Rich, Diverse Heritage
"Massoud Hayoun is a member of the Arab diaspora. With Moroccan, Egyptian, and Tunisian heritage, he is also Jewish. His new book, When We Were Arabs, is an absorbing family history that spans continents and epochs. Hayoun uses his grandparents' stories to illuminate the fading history of a once thriving Arab Jewish community. In the process, he delivers a scathing indictment of colonialism. He considers his Arabness "cultural," "African," and "Jewish," but "retaliatory" as well...
In 'What Could Be Saved,' Harmony Comes From Human Ties
"The German viola I played during my serious music days failed to accrue value; twentieth century German instruments don't produce a warm enough sound. For tone, you need Italian or French or English. In some cases, American will do, as Gregory Spatz attests in his new collection. Set in and around Seattle, Spatz's What Could Be Saved plumbs the rarified world of high-end stringed instruments....
'Ladysitting' Offers Candor And A Singular Take On A Tale Familiar To Many
"In telling her Nana's story, Cary invites readers into a complex extended family, replete with the conflict and contradiction that accompany most families. At the same time, Cary recounts a distinctly American story: flight from racial terrorism in the south, economic and academic success against harsh odds, and the often-fraught mixing of races....
'Republic Of Lies' Explores The Fixation With Conspiracy Theories
"Since its founding, America has been fertile ground for conspiracy beliefs. While every generation produces rumor-mongers, today we anoint them with special powers through social media. Anna Merlan, a journalist at Gizmodo Media Group, explores our contemporary fixation with conspiracy theories of all political stripes in Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. Throughout the book, she reports from gatherings of people whose beliefs are both extreme and false....
'Now, Now, Louison' Attempts To Bring Art, And Its Artist, To Life
"Can a writer put visual art on the page? Or render a visual artist's creative impulses into words?Now, Now, Louison is Jean Frémon's freewheeling effort to do so. Frémon — lawyer, writer and gallery owner — inhabits artist Louise Bourgeois as if she herself were writing this novel-cum-memoir. Elegantly translated by Cole Swensen, Now, Now, Louison portrays a woman whose mind never rests, whose capacious memory serves as a bottomless source of artistic inspiration....
In 'Who Killed My Father,' A Son Renders His Father Seen And Heard
"Who Killed My Father, by French writer Édouard Louis (lyrically translated by Lorin Stein), is a brief, poetic telling of the myriad ways societal contempt, homophobia, and poverty can kill a man. Following Louis' autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, this book is a deeply personal meditation: a gay man speaking to a father mired in toxic masculinity, whose absence is louder than his presence, but who ultimately finds love and understanding — even respect — for that same son....
Aspirations Come Up Against Economic Hardship In 'Sounds Like Titanic'
"J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Sarah Smarsh's Heartland present two views of America's rural-urban divide. Sounds Like Titanic captivates us with a third: a girl who grows up in an educated family in Appalachia, whose aspirations thrust her into a battle to support herself, but really enlist her in a war against a deeply unfair economic system. Hindman doesn't shrink from the big, systemic picture, but her fascinating personal story, with its unexpected twists, puts the memorable into this memoir....
'Tonic And Balm' Builds A World In A Bottle
"The year is 1919. Doc Bell's Miracle and Mirth Medicine Show — part circus, part sideshow, all charlatanism — travels rural America, trying to gin up enough audience to support the enterprise. The characters in Tonic and Balm, Stephanie Allen's debut novel, are the performers, roustabouts, fixers, and seamstresses who inhabit Doc Bell's self-contained world....
'Joy Enough' Recalls A Daughter's All-Encompassing Love For Her Mother
"I loved my mother and she died. Is that a story?" Yes, it is the story that Sarah McColl tells in her memoir, Joy Enough. Embedded in the question, which is the first line of the book, is McColl herself — how she grew up in the family that her mother Allison created, how she entered adulthood and married, how her marriage fell apart as Allison was dying. "Extinctions takes a hard look at the politics of adoption, cultural appropriation, loss, deracination, and professional frustration, without Wilson letting up her fictional grip....
'Extinctions' Digs Up Buried Memories and Unacknowledged History|NPR Books
"Extinctions takes a hard look at the politics of adoption, cultural appropriation, loss, deracination, and professional frustration, without Wilson letting up her fictional grip....
'We Begin In Gladness' Brings A Message Of Poetry's Importance In Today's World|NPR Books
"Life in today's world can be frenetic and anxious; we are often too distracted to appreciate each other and our universe. Poetry demands that we pause and listen. 'A poem is something that can't otherwise be said addressed to someone who can't otherwise hear it....
'Heavy' Brilliantly Renders The Struggle to Become Fully Realized|NPR Books
"...Dear white people, please read this memoir. Dear America, please read this book. Kiese Laymon is a star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful. Heavy is at once a paean to the Deep South, a condemnation of our fat-averse culture, and a brilliantly rendered memoir of growing up black, and bookish, and entangled in a family that is as challenging as it is grounding."
A Mysterious Respect for Lies: On Éric Vuillard’s ‘Order of the Day’|The Millions
"Order of the Day is a stark examination of the price of silence, the cost of sticking to the rules to keep the peace, and the human toll when ruling elites not only go along to get along, but support the ravings of a violent and vengeful leader....
Washington Black: A Novel|The Millions
"Washington Black is a terrific new narrative about enslavement, but that description fails to do it justice. Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s third novel, long-listed for the Booker Prize, is a multi-faceted tale that travels across geography and history. In its rich details and finely tuned ear for language, the book creates a virtual world, immersing the reader in antebellum America and Canada, as well as in Victorian England....
In The Powerful 'Deviation,' Luce D'Eramo Rejects Her Past And Faces An Uncertain Future|NPR Books
"... D'Eramo bears witness to her teenage years, which stand in sharp relief even against the great conflagration. Her version of youth is unimaginably extreme, and the telling of it carves out new territory. It is not simply D'Eramo's personal story, but also her ruthless quest for self-knowledge, that render Deviation a literary tour de force.
'The Most Dangerous Branch' Asks Whether The Supreme Court Has Become Too Powerful|NPR Books
"Kaplan begins with the drama surrounding Justice Scalia's death on a west Texas ranch. He goes on to describe the behind the scenes dealings that led to the appointments of the sitting Supreme Court, and the even more 'inside baseball' of how these nine people vote. If you aren't a regular on the Washington cocktail circuit or a subscriber to SCOTUSblog, this material is presented at a level of granularity with which you may not be familiar. It makes for engaging, if not reassuring, reading....
'American Hate' Profiles Survivors, But Also Brings Hope|NPR Books
"...Read American Hate for the faces Sethi puts on our national hate epidemic, and for his sobering account of the fallout — humiliation, terror, injury, and death. But read American Hate, as well, for what the last chapter terms "Hope in a Time of Despair." Hate may be rampant in America, but so are its antidotes: We must understand and own our history. We must speak out, for in community is power and love.
The Abundant Life: A Novel|Washington Independent Review of Books
"The hero (or anti-hero) of Aaron Jacobs’ The Abundant Life is Alex Wolf, a Jewish boy who goes rogue as a teenage gunrunner, does hard time, and returns home to — not much. Meet his struggling family: Mom’s a bleeding heart working in a homeless shelter; Dad’s a gambler and a business failure; and little sister Rachel’s greatest aspiration is to leave home for college....
A Book for the Moment: On Helen Weinzweig's Basic Black with Pearls|Bloom
"In our current moment, a chorus of “nasty women” has flooded social media with grievances. Unfortunately, these grievances recur with grim regularity. But even before modes of communication expanded and modernized, storytelling was the constant, the vehicle to voice oppression. Fiction has always been a means for coding muzzled, transgressive complaints....
Obsession is Universal|The Millions
"Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition. It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain....
'How to Write,' Yes--But...|NPR Books
"Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer's pencil in favor of luxuriating in the words. Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic....
'Decarcerating America' Is A Powerful Call For Reform|NPR Books
"Criminalization is frequently America's answer to social issues. This country criminalizes people experiencing drug addiction and homelessness, women seeking abortions, people who are LGBTQ, students who skip school, immigrants and refugees, and more....
Three Odysseys|The Millions
Three recent odysseys range in time and theme, from ancient to dystopian. Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey launches from Homer’s epic, 2017 National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing road trips to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and Jesús Carrasco’s Out in the Open follows a young boy’s harrowing escape from abuse across an unnamed landscape. No matter their geography, these books share exceptional writing, mining vast expanses of the human experience.
When Home is Elsewhere|Cargo Literary
"We spent a day at the Berlin wall, scrawled with art accreted over decades; symbolism of an oppression fresh in memory. “Let’s build a wall,” the authorities said, erecting a concrete barrier that rendered home part of a contrived ‘east’ or a coveted ‘west.’ The wall separated families and lovers, and isolated a regime whose most productive output was an intricate web of at-home spymasters...
Addiction is a Family Affair in 'Mayhem'|NPR Books
"Rausing's core message is this: Addiction is a family affair. Her book embraces those surrounding the addict by courageously exposing her own self-doubt and heartache. She wants us to know her — her seemingly idyllic Swedish childhood, two caring parents raising three children...
'Ghost Of The Innocent Man' Chronicles Justice Too Long Delayed|NPR Books
"Innocence cases spotlight the many corruptions of our justice system: Mistakes beget mistakes — some intentional, some not. An epic bureaucracy protects a deeply flawed system. Thousands are wrongfully convicted. The National Registry of Exonerations calculates that over 18,000 years have been lost by innocent people serving time....
In Search of Lost Words: Novels on Dementia|The Millions
"Golden reminds us that dementia disrupts 'cognitive skills such as memory, judgment and language,' thus destroying the writer’s hammer and chisel. 'The words hurl through his lips with a familiar bad taste,' she writes at the opening of The Wide Circumference of Love. 'Words are that slimy, slippery, burn inside him like a house on fire....
Eight for Eight |The Millions
"With entwined subtexts of persecution and forced emigration, the Passover story feels less like ancient history and more like current affairs. The new White House is hellbent to expel immigrants and deny refugees and Muslims entrance into the country.... The primacy of the written word is central to Judaism, in part due to the constant, urgent need to abandon possessions and escape. Books are portable and words are tough to murder."
Abortion and Fiction|The Millions
God has strong opinions on reproductive rights, at least according to many Americans. Our new vice president, who “made a commitment to Christ [as] a born-again, evangelical Catholic,” led a frontal assault on reproductive rights as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives..... Five recent and forthcoming books address the fallout from America’s long, fraught wars over reproductive rights. Religion plays a central role...
Where Fiction Heralds Facts, 'The German Girl'|The Millions
The German Girl (in Spanish, translated by Nick Caistor), is a novel with a purpose: To expose the atrocity of the S.S. St. Louis, whose 1939 voyage from Hamburg to Cuba exemplifies the fatal consequences of closed borders and failed humanity, of hope gone horrendously wrong....
To Open Borders: 'Him, Me, Muhammad Ali'|The Millions
With compelling themes of displacement and reinvention, these stories push boundaries — probing race, class, sexual identity, and family; the role of women in Arab and American culture; and much more. In this collection, mythology meets reality, and Jarrar’s palette spans the world....
Two Women, Two Lives, Two Stories|The Millions
Pamela Erens’s new novel, Eleven Hours, opens with the push and tug between laboring patient and nurse. Lore, the expectant mother, rigid and stubborn—“No, the girl says, she will not wear the fetal monitoring belt”—and Franckline, her nurse: “These girls with their birth plans…as if much of anything about a birth can be planned.” ...
Lighter, Thinner, Smaller: On Lost Girls and Lost Mothers|The Millions
Lynn Steger Strong’s debut, Hold Still, joins a spate of recent novels that explores lost girls and their mothers. Some of these books feature tragic, deceased girls, while others feature heart-rending girls who though not physically lost, have lost themselves....
Death & Sentences: Cult Crit|Heck
"Michael Morton was lucky; his prosecutor didn't seek the death penalty. Instead, Morton got a life sentence for the murder of his wife, while his wife's killer went free—and bludgeoned to death at least one other woman....
The Rosenbergs Live: On Nostalgia and Red Scare Realities|The Millions
"Consider the backdrop. America, flush with victory, was pivoting to Cold War politics. Redbaiting was in; Fireside Chats out. Against the shiny orange roofs of proliferating Howard Johnsons and the pulsating floors of teenaged sock hops, the country was off to war again....
Books We Can't Quit|[PANK] Magazine
"I heard her on the radio; I found her book at the library. Neither sufficed. I had to own Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire. The leading man in this taut, beautiful novel is Aldred Leith—measured, strong, true—crisscrossing continents out of duty curiosity, and ultimately love....
Fates and Furies|The Washington Independent Review of Books
" Lauren Groff’s new novel, Fates and Furies, lifts the lid on a marriage and motors through the stew. Lancelot (Lotto for short) and Mathilde wed at age 22; their love ignites on page one and keeps ablaze throughout...
Laundry and Other Reflections|The Nervous Breakdown
"To reach Morocco, my family travels by ferry from Algeciras, Spain to the port of Tangier. Which is not Tangier, but an armed camp with a formidable police presence, enclosed in barbed wire...
Mostly Political: Books on Classical Music|Tin House Correspondent's Course
"I progressed, improbably, from preparing for a career as a professional violist to a position running a social justice foundation. Anyone who's spent their formative years in music knows the training to be relentless and indelible. Ever since then, I've been on a quest for fiction that transmits music to the page....
Liner Notes|The Washington Independent Review of Books
" No worries, Angie Merkel. Big Brother has progressed from eavesdropping on heads of state to hunting musicians. The feds are chasing a classical composer turned amateur scientist in Richard Powers’ Orfeo. In Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors, it’s a conductor/scientist framed by the NKVD....
Privacy for Writers|The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Whether you’re transfixed by Edward Snowden or making decisions about your Facebook settings, it’s hard to avoid thinking about privacy these days. For writers, privacy is a weighty term. Privacy means an expansive mental space that is inaccessible to the world outside. Privacy is what writers have craved since storytellers first chiseled words into rocks....
First and Second Looks: Kindred by Octavia Butler|Narrative Magazine
"The daughter of a shoeshiner and a maid, Octavia Butler grew up reading the books her mother brought home from the white people’s houses she cleaned. Though dyslexic, Butler started writing science fiction as a teenager and published her first story at the age of twenty-four....
An Appreciation of Anthony Doerr|The Washington Independent Review of Books
"To open a book by Anthony Doerr is to open a door on humanity. No matter what appalling evils surround the characters — including evils in which they participate — Doerr manages to deliver a world lit with love and compassion....
All Roads Lead Home|The Washington Independent Review of Books
“For thirty-five years I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story.” So begins Bohumil Hrabal’s slim “novel,” Too Loud a Solitude (translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim). Or is it a memoir of the author’s lost intellectual freedom, buried under communism’s oppressive bulldozer?....
Beethoven Got There First|The Millions
"Pity the novel. Once upon a time it was a big baggy story told in chronological order by an omniscient narrator. Over time it's been marginalized, shunned, belittled, banned, and more recently broken into pieces that vie with each other to make a cohesive whole....
When the Stars Align: On Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries|The Millions
"Leave it to the astrologers to forecast unusual cosmological events for the coming months. What’s certain is that under the sign of Libra, the reading public will be gifted that rarest literary treasure, a book of such dazzling breadth and scope that it defies any label short of masterpiece....
One Nightstand, Six Affairs: Novels of Illicit Love|NPR
"Summer is the time for flings and affairs, a season that evokes daydreams about what could have been. But if you don't fancy yourself straying, books are
an ideal way to live vicariously. You can explore all the naughty things you can't quite bring yourself to do, fantasize about the love you long for, or, on
the more serious side, plumb the pages for truths about our human capacity for ecstasy and pain....
an ideal way to live vicariously. You can explore all the naughty things you can't quite bring yourself to do, fantasize about the love you long for, or, on
the more serious side, plumb the pages for truths about our human capacity for ecstasy and pain....
Three Family Secrets We Can't Keep|NPR
"My sister and I moved my grandmother to a nursing home when she was 107. Clearing out her apartment, we stumbled on a box of old papers. A crumbling leather portfolio emerged, overflowing with love poems written in her assertive hand. Love poems? ...
I Hear America Reading: A Fourth of July Ode|Washington Independent Review of Books
"July Fourth denotes summer in America; the apex of family road trips, outdoor soundstages and backyard barbecues that arc between Memorial Day and Labor Day. As we celebrate Independence Day, we need to remind ourselves of the infinity of experience behind it--the compelling mix of painful struggle and triumphant reinvention that makes us uniquely us....
For Passover, Fresh New Takes on "People of the Book"|Washington Independent Review of Books
"Spring heralds the holiday of Passover, in which Jews celebrate their escape from bondage during ancient times. We receive the Passover story from a major literary work — the book of Exodus. A second book also plays a significant role in the holiday, the Haggadah, providing the script for the retelling of the Exodus around Passover’s ritual family meal, the Seder....
Anna Karenina|Washington Independent Review of Books
"Now comes Anna Karenina, once more bursting onto the world stage via Joe Wright’s grand new film. In case you haven’t had the chance to read it, I’d like to recommend Leo Tolstoy’s screenplay. Anna Karenina is a big book about everything. It covers the spectrum of human nature and human emotion. And that’s an understatement....
Lost in Translation|Washington Independent Review of Books
"For an unnerving take on the World War II underground, try The Darkroom of Damocles. The protagonist fancies himself working for the Dutch Resistance against the Nazis, but the reader is never certain. Vacant and amoral, the main character leaves us confused and queasy about whose side he’s on. Was it the translation (Ina Rilke) or the underlying text (W. F. Hermans)?....
Slow Reads|Washington Independent Review of Books
"One of the great pleasures of cold weather is taking the time to prepare a hearty meal. I love the smell of pumpkin-butternut squash soup bubbling on my stove, or beef stew that spends the day simmering—sending off the pungent smells of oregano, red wine, and onions in brine. Slow Food USA advises that 'every day can be enriched by doing something slow.' As a society we appear to be failing miserably at that....
Bird of Paradise|Washington Independent Review of Books
"Diana Abu-Jaber’s latest novel pivots around a missing teenager whose long absence is a continuing grief for her family. After multiple attempts at running away, Felice Muir finally succeeds when she is thirteen. The novel opens five years later....
The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel|Washington Independent Review of Books
"If only The Druggist of Auschwitz were fiction. The book’s sole imaginary character, however, is the narrator, Adam Salmen. Said to be the “last Jew of Schässburg,” (now Sigişoara, Romania), Adam’s occasional commentary coils through ghastly fact...
Novel Fragments|Washington Independent Review of Books
"A friend of mine describes her seven-year-old’s movie habits: he puts in the DVD and opens to ‘scene selections.’ No matter what order the full-length film, he designs his own screening sequence which may not include the complete movie. It strikes me that his viewing style reflects the moment. Tweets and texts splinter our conversations; cell phones and emails invade our work meetings and stalk our vacations. Let’s face it, electronics are fragmenting our times....
The Great Night|Washington Independent Review of Books
"Who remembers Titania’s boy, stolen from an Indian king? Puck informs us that Queen Titania “never had so sweet a changeling.” The boy sparks King Oberon’s jealous wrath in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — an offstage but essential catalyst for all that follows. Even so, we tend to forget about him as we get ensnared in the ensuing drama....
The Last Brother|Washington Independent Review of Books
"In the bleak winter of 1940-41, a small schooner carrying 1,584 Jewish men, women and children fled Nazi-occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland for Palestine, where the British authorities refused landing, detaining the boat during several weeks of storms. When the seas calmed, the British deported this desperate human cargo to Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean....