Roberta Silman
Some fiction can, literally, have the smell of too much research. And so, although I admire the ambition and scope of Audrey Schulman’s new novel, “Three Weeks in December,” I also feel that she made things harder for herself than she needed to.
The novel is a brilliant psychological thriller, and several other things as well — a very quiet love story, a narrative of a remarkable friendship between two men, and an exploration of the corruption rampant in Argentine politics in the late 60s and 70s.
Although he has set himself an ambitious task with all that is happening in “The List,” Martin Fletcher has complete command of this material and has created a complex novel that is also a good thriller.
In this novel, author Ismet Prcic’s confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in the story.
A best-seller in France, Emmanuel Carrère’s quirky, but ultimately compelling memoir examines the effects of two disasters on very separate groups of people to whom the writer is connected, at the beginning, quite peripherally.
Should we fictionalize the Holocaust? This is not only a literary question, but a moral one as well, issues raised by the publication of the translation of “The Emperor of Lies,” a novel about the ways in which the Jews in the Lodz ghetto struggled to survive the Nazis.
For those who imagine Tanglewood only as concerts in the huge shed which seats 6,000, these Sunday morning concerts offer a more intimate experience as well as a chance to hear modern pieces they never would hear in what we all call the “regular concert fare,”
Most great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.
If you are going to write about this very charged subject, the West and Islam, why would you choose as a representative of that great and ancient culture a woman who is stunted emotionally, clearly unreliable, and probably mentally unstable?
One of the mandates of the Winship Prize is that it be by a New Englander or set in New England. Moyer is a retired Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at American University who now lives in Eastham on the Cape where he has been writing full time for several years.
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