fiction

Book Review: A Classic of Cinematic Fiction — “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty”

June 2, 2015
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What if Alfred Hitchcock had sat out behind his Holmby Hills bungalow, smoking clove cigarettes and writing chick-lit novels?

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Book Review: “We All Looked Up” — A Book and Album Where Adolescence Meets the Apocalypse

May 14, 2015
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It’s not by accident that some of the greatest coming-of-age stories are concerned with deconstructing social stereotypes.

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Book Review: “Missing Reels” — Breezy Film Fiction

December 19, 2014
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Ace film blogger Farran Smith Nehme’s first novel grows directly out of her adoration of classic American cinema.

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Book Review: “The Paying Guests” — Sarah Waters Serves Up More of History’s Ghosts

September 15, 2014
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We all have ghosts, the author seems to say. And in a larger sense, Sarah Waters’s ghosts are those of country and culture, her books a catalogue of the social changes shaking England from the Victorian era on.

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Book Review: “The Poets’ Wives” — What Does it Mean to be Married to a Poet?

May 23, 2014
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Taken as a whole, “The Poets’ Wives” is a fascinating, brave novel whose love of poetry breathes through all three sections.

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Book Review: “The Marrying of Chani Kaufman” — The World of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Treated With Verve and Empathy

April 25, 2014
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Beneath the humor and the warmth and the charm of this novel, author Eve Harris bears witness to an existence far more complex and troubled than Ultra-Orthodox Jews might like to admit.

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Book Review: “An Unnecessary Woman” — A Memorable Story of Redemption

February 5, 2014
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When the septuagenarian protagonist of this novel finally gets out of her claustrophobic apartment, everything changes.

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Book Review: “The Devil I Know” — A Brilliant Satire of Ireland’s Boom and Bust

February 3, 2014
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Claire Kilroy’s dark and fantastical comedy “The Devil I Know” nails the greed and rampaging ambition of the corrupt avatars of “the new Ireland” — developers, bankers, and government pooh-bahs.

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Book Review: “The Elixir of Immortality” — A Fabulous Ride Through European History

February 1, 2014
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Love stories, treachery, brilliant plans, history itself gone awry – it’s all here in inspiring abundance in this fabulous novel, where the Spinozas make their way through hundreds of years of European history.

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Book Review: Richard Powers’s Urgent “Orfeo” — Can Art Save Us?

January 27, 2014
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As with any Richard Powers novel, when you finish “Orfeo” you will have no doubt you are alive, awake, and likely ready to start over at page one.

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