fiction

Book Review: The Survival of the Fittest Yarnspinner

July 12, 2012
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Reading “The Storytelling Animal” is akin to listening to a series of terrific humanities lectures given by a polymath professor with a P.T. Barnum streak.

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Fiction Review: “Sarah Thornhill” — A Lyrical Song in the Australian Outback

June 27, 2012
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You are hardly aware of the historical facts. Kate Grenville internalizes them so completely in her novel there is not a sentence that “stinks of history,” as a friend of mine once said about whole historical fiction genre.

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Book Review: “When the Night” — A Memorably Icy Love Story

May 11, 2012
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In spare, exact prose Cristian Comencini lets this story unfold against an Alpine setting that is so vivid it, too, becomes a character in this strangely compelling novel.

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Book Review: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence Opens

May 3, 2012
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Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, has opened in Istanbul.

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Book Review: “Jane Eyre” Rewired — “The Flight of Gemma Hardy”

April 22, 2012
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Author Margo Livesey has pulled off a considerable literary trick: a page-turner that is also a moving, realistic, subtle, and eminently wise coming-of-age novel.

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Book Review: “The O’Briens”— A Grand Family Epic

April 3, 2012
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“The O’Briens” is a good sink-your-teeth-into read that explores the capricious nature of destiny with grace and humor and shows great compassion for its characters.

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Book Review: “The Last Nude” — An Engaging Historical Fiction About Seductive Surfaces

March 30, 2012
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Even though she covers herself with demurely crossed arms, her gaze could burn holes through fabric. If it looks like the artist had a predilection for strong, bosomy girls, well, there’s a reason for that.

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Book Commentary: Hooked on Phonics? — A Brief Reply to Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”

March 9, 2012
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While sound is certainly important, and language in the proper hands has its own music, syllabic harmonies need not be trumpeted as though they were the foundation of good prose.

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Book Review: Niccolò Ammaniti’s “Me and You” — a lightly charming, digestible morsel

January 27, 2012
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Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti usually writes with an unadorned style about moral predicaments of the young in small-town Italy. “Me and You,” a slender effort in all respects, covers this ground as well, with the difference that fourteen-year-old protagonist Lorenzo Cumi is from an affluent Roman family.

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Book Review: An Outstanding “List”

November 30, 2011
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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.

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