Review: ‘The Way Things Were’ by Aatish Taseer
A multitude of Indias crowd the pages of Aatish Taseer's third novel, "The Way Things Were," an ambitious family epic that charts the dazzling complexity of Indian politics and culture...
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Review: ‘Let Me Tell You’ by Shirley Jackson
As a child, I was fascinated with my mother's old paperback copy of "The Lottery and Other Stories" by Shirley Jackson. When I asked my mother about the book, which...
Review: ‘Music for Wartime’ by Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai writes stories like houses: brick and mortar, but strangely alive. At their best, they fall together lightly, as if four walls and a roof should just happen to...
Review: ‘The Small Backs of Children’ by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch's 2011 memoir "The Chronology of Water" was a sucker-punch in the best possible way. Eschewing the standard narrative arc of trauma and redemption, Yuknavitch presented the events of...
When ‘Go Set a Watchman’ arrives, what awaits the grown Scout Finch?
I recently stumbled across a fashion website that dared to follow the headline "To Kill a Mockingbird Sequel Announced" with the pressing question: "Is Scout Still a Tomboy?" In the...
Review: ‘In the Country’ by Mia Alvar
"Your mother gets sick, you don't leave her for a healthier mother," explains the protagonist of "In the Country," the powerful novella that closes out Mia Alvar's fiction debut of...
Review: ‘The Well’ by Catherine Chanter
In 2013, Catherine Chanter's debut novel "The Well" won the Lucy Cavendish fiction prize for a first novel that "marries literary merit with unputdownability," a description that perhaps unintentionally implies...
Review: ‘The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty’ by Vendela Vida
Vendela Vida began building a micro-genre all her own with 2003's "And Now You Can Go," a novel about a young woman struggling to make sense of a brutal encounter...
Review: ‘Saint Mazie’ by Jami Attenberg
In 2012, Jami Attenberg's third novel, "The Middlesteins," became a best-seller, its food-addicted protagonist Edie striking a nerve in a culture increasingly obsessed with the social costs of obesity. Attenberg's...
Review: ‘Mislaid’ by Nell Zink
Profiles of Nell Zink, of which there are many, can be as dizzying to read as her books. The one-time author of an animal-themed, post-punk fanzine, she addressed all her...