fiction

Book Review: Katherine Heiny’s “Games and Rituals” — Charmingly Amusing Stories

May 2, 2023
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Katherine Heiny has a particular talent for opening lines: “Your elderly father has mistaken his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eaten it.”

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Book Review: Susanna Hoffs’s “This Bird Has Flown” — A Satisfying Romcom

April 4, 2023
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All in all, This Bird Has Flown is light but not brainless, and engagingly adorable. It’s a perfect beach read for the New Wave set.

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Book Review: Mona Simpson’s “Commitment” — E for Effort

April 3, 2023
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Another installment in the author’s portraits of everyday struggles — and this one is a long-winded, shaggy affair.

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Book Review: “Big Swiss” — Quirky As All Get-Out

February 23, 2023
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Big Swiss is effervescent and funny, even if overcooked to some extent.

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Book Review: “The World and All That It Holds” — A Remarkable Achievement

February 9, 2023
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Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel is simply dizzying, filled with texture, startling imagery, language in multiple tongues (keep Google within reach!), and it succeeds in most every respect.

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Short Fuse Podcast #55: Talking to Author Meredith Hall about “Beneficence”

June 14, 2022
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Host Elizabeth Howard talks to author Meredith Hall about her debut novel Beneficence, which deals with a family traumatized by death of a child by a gun.

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Book Review: “The Ash Family” — A Commune or a Cult?

March 24, 2019
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The Ash Family is a full-color illustration of how the modern world leaves people vulnerable to radical ideas.

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Book Review: “Washington Black” — Grappling with the Meanings of Liberty

November 8, 2018
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In Washington Black novelist Esi Edugyan has defied the cliché of the escaped slave discovering freedom.

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Book Review: “The Mars Room” — Women Behind Bars

October 14, 2018
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The strength of The Mars Room is its compelling vision of the stultifying and claustrophobic underworld of women in prison.

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Book Commentary: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Why I Write” — Incomplete Answer

October 2, 2018
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The old questions, good as they are, are going to be augmented with new ones: Are we creating a world worth living in? Are we creating a world we can continue to live in?

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