about 1 year ago - No comments
My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike by Joyce Carol Oates In My Sister, My Love, which Oates, disingenuously, calls ‘a work of the imagination solely’, the setting is New Jersey and the murder victim is a six-year-old ice-skating prodigy called Bliss. The Ramseys have become the Rampikes – just to keep
about 1 year ago - No comments
A Better Angel: Stories by Chris Adrian If you’re a character in a Chris Adrian story, chances are that something has gone horribly wrong. You’re probably ill, mentally or physically, or you’re suffering from the traumatic loss of a brother or a parent or, more simply, your ability to move through the world with equanimity.
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The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: A Novel by Victor Pelevin In this satirical, erotic allegory of the post-Soviet and post-9/11 world, Victor Pelevin gives new meaning to the words “unreliable narrator.†The story is told by a shape-shifting nymphet named A Hu-Li, a red-haired Asiatic call girl who is some 2,000 years old but
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The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti Hannah Tinti’s first novel, “The Good Thief,†opens at a Catholic orphanage in New England, where the statue of St. Anthony in the courtyard can’t help the boys recover what they’ve lost. Ren, the book’s hero, is missing not only his family but also his left hand, the skin
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The Believers: A Novel by Zoë Heller ‘The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.’ So begins Zoë Heller’s third novel, The Believers, with the words of Marxist heavyweight Antonio Gramsci. It’s a nuanced epigraph for a nuanced tale: an observant and unsentimental family drama that pits rationalism against faith
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The Butt: A Novel by Will Self Will Self hates you. No matter who you are, no matter what you profess to believe, he can’t stand you. As an accomplished satirist, he’s entitled to hate you, but you’re entitled — perhaps you should even be encouraged — to hate him right back. In Self’s new
about 1 year ago - No comments
Goldengrove: A Novel by Francine Prose The animating spirit of Francine Prose’s new novel is the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.†It supplies not only the novel’s title and epigraph but also the names of its central character and of the bookstore her family owns. Characters discuss the verse
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery The story flits between the confessions of two women: Renée Michel, a 54-year-old concierge in a Parisian block of luxury apartments, and Paloma Josse, a precocious 12-year-old girl, the daughter of one of the most bourgeois families in the house. Paloma has decided that life is meaningless
about 1 year ago - No comments
Exit Music by Ian Rankin Even The Night by Michael Koryta Tethered: A Novel by Amy MacKinnon Silks by Dick Francis & Felix Francis Crime – New Crime and Mystery Novels – Review – NYTimes.com.No Tag
about 1 year ago - No comments
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother†is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox
