Roberta Silman
There are so many characters to root for in “The Wanting” that you tend to read with your head swimming, and with an increasing sense of urgency as the senseless is revealed to have a logic of its own.
This is not just a story of a plucky girl succeeding; in weaving her complicated story and giving credit to those who helped her to understand how to think critically and how to develop her own moral philosophy, Sonia Sotomayor never forgets that luck and serendipity also play a part.
Though written in 1984, The House of Jasmine’s description of widespread political corruption and social decay in the Sadat era is powerfully relevant to the uprisings of 2011 when Mubarak was ousted and that are still roiling Egypt today.
Uzma Aslam Khan is a wonderful writer whose descriptions of the northern part of Pakistan and the fast fading way of life that had been lived there for hundreds of years are sometimes stunning.
Touted in author Jonas Jonasson’s native Sweden as the perfect antidote to the grim noir Swedish trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this delicious book has sold over 3 million copies around the world.
Isaiah Sheffer’s lasting contribution will be his almost single-handed revival of interest in that most beguiling of fictional forms, the short story.
I can see why celebrated Korean writer Young-ha Kim was attracted to this real life story of about a thousand Koreans emigrating from Asia in 1904.
I can say, without equivocation, that Helen Dunmore’s novel “The Greatcoat” is no “The Turn of the Screw.”
When the performance ended and I sat there, silent, reveling with the rest of the audience in the goose bumps that inevitably occur after such an experience, I knew, in my bones, that no movie, however good, could be as good as this.
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