Different on surface, alike at heart
Like many ideas, this seemed like a good one at the time: Ask novelists Jacquelyn Mitchard and Elizabeth Berg to appear in the latest installment of our Author Talks series....
Home > Reviews
All Stories
‘Tony and Susan’ by Austin Wright
Reading an ex-husband's unpublished novel might seem a daunting endeavor, but Susan Morrow has been divorced from Edward Sheffield for 15 years, and they now exchange Christmas cards. He says...
Interviewer’s opinion: Talking about painful stuff
There was no way to get around it: Sapphire writes about painful stuff. Several friends begged off, declining my invitation to our event with Sapphire. I kept thinking of what...
‘The All of It’ by Jeannette Haien
A friend passed Jeannette Haien's "The All of It" to writer Ann Patchett, and she was so taken with the novel that she embarked on a crusade to win it...
The power of place to transform lives
From the pleasant opera-loving terrorists in "Bel Canto" to the endlessly fertile Amazon women in her new novel, "State of Wonder," Ann Patchett creates magical stories. No wizards or vampires,...
‘Rules of Civility’ by Amor Towles
In the first few pages of "Rules of Civility," Amor Towles' wonderful debut novel, it's New Year's Eve in Manhattan, with 1938 a few hours away. Snow powders Washington Square's...
Sapphire talks about the difficult birth of ‘The Kid’
A vast national audience rooted for Precious, the heroine of the film of that name and of Sapphire's novel "Push," as she learned to read with a dedicated teacher's help....
‘The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’ by Melissa Bank
Before Match.com, just as "Sex and the City" was making a splash, and before bookstores were embattled, "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing" arrived on the scene. In a...
“So Long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell
A boy moves away from his small-town central Illinois home after his father murders a tenant farmer. Years later, an occasional childhood playmate ignores the boy in a high school...
A “Precious” interview of Sapphire, author of “Push,” and its sequel, “The Kid”
"Precious" (movie) put Sapphire (author) on the map. Claireese Precious Jones, the poor, obese, sexually abused girl with AIDS who triumphed by learning to write, was also a mother. Her...