An enigmatic book with a puzzling title, Prayer and Parable explores the lives and thoughts of ordinary people with the assumption that we might learn something from their interactions and
Middle-aged Sandy Sullivan works as a home stager in the suburbs of Boston. But Sandy is frustrated. She desperately wants to sell the huge home she and her husband, Greg, bought many years ago.
If author Lynne Tillman were writing recipes and not short fiction, she no doubt would insist that all ingredients be fresh, crisp, and organic—because her short stories are of the sort that seem v
Quirky and edgy—the yin and yang of a good story. These two words give the concise description of The Brick Murder: A Tragedy, an anthology of short stories by Kurt Jose Ayau.
Early on in the pages of his latest novel, The Burning House, author Paul Lisicky diligently gives his readers an overview of the mechanics on which his story will spin, as he writes:
Bonnie Jo Campbell (a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) takes on tough subjects in her fiction, and this tale of a rebellious wilderness girl in Michigan is no ex
The competing interests of the Big Law game—power, ego, money, competing with sense of partnership, duty to advocate clients’ interests, and pursuit of justice as an officer of the court—are all ex
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous, unfinished novel is a study in ambiguity, anchored in the trivial precision of personal statistical descriptions and the apparent precisio
No stranger to the newspaper industry herself, Rainbow Rowell’s debut is incredibly fun, quirky and full of charm; and reads like You’ve Got Mail meets Four Weddings and a Funeral
Ann Patchett’s newest novel, State of Wonder, begins when a Minnesota pharmaceutical company receives word that one of its researchers has perished “from fever” deep in the Amazon jungle,
In Nazareth, North Dakota, debut novelist Tommy Zurhellen lovingly reimagines the New Testament as a series of interlocking tales set in the northernmost regions of the American heartland.
In the introduction to his new collection of selected essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, novelist and author Geoff Dyer writes, “When writers have achieved a certain reputatio
Early in Jessica Hagedorn’s fourth novel, Toxicology, filmmaker Mimi Smith is confronted on a New York subway by a poetry-spouting homeless man who asks her “Can you help me out with some
The trouble with most history books is that they are generally impersonal. They offer up the facts and then focus solely on the public figures that actually shaped events.
Although Sarah Gardner Borden’s compelling debut, Games to Play After Dark, has drawn reasonable comparisons to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, it might be more constructive to
Have you ever felt so stressed out and betrayed that you want to run away? Jamie Newman feels the need to flee when she learns her boyfriend is cheating on her with her older stepsister Laurel.
