American fiction

Book Review: “The Road from Belhaven” — How Hope and Resilience Can Prevail

March 15, 2024
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Margot Livesey has given us an exhilarating historical novel filled with fascinating details of a different time in an isolated part of the world, all rendered in gorgeous prose.

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Film Review: “American Fiction” — Pinned Down by Blackness

December 10, 2023
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In this promising filmmaking debut of Cord Jefferson, we’re given a too-rare peek in cinema into upper middle-class African-American life.

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Book Review: “No One Left To Come Looking For You” — An Amusing Excursion

January 7, 2023
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Sam Lipsyte’s latest novel does a bang-up job of capturing the edgy and zany milieu of the early ’90s.

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Fuse Book Review: Novelist Jay McInerney — Nimble Chronicler of America’s Upper Class

August 18, 2016
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Jay McInerney’s characters may live on exotic mixed drinks and fine wines, but they still suffer moral dilemmas and have consciences they cannot silence.

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Book Review: Towering Rage and Bottomless Mirth—Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity”

October 20, 2015
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My biggest gripe is with a central tenet of Jonathan Franzen’s fiction: communication between generations is impossible.

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Book Review: “Half an Inch of Water” — Nine Stories that Peer Memorably into Eternity

September 14, 2015
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One of the hardest things to do as a writer of contemporary fiction is to create characters who are good.

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Book Review: Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” — A Vision of Life More Damned Than Redeemed

October 2, 2014
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Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead.

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Book Review: Donald Antrim’s “The Emerald Light in the Air” — Unabashedly Gorgeous

September 2, 2014
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The Emerald Light in the Air is important reading for those interested in the state of the American short story, or of American fiction in general.

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