The promotional materials that accompanied my review copy of James Franco’s debut fiction collection, Palo Alto, set the bar impossibly high for the 30-something actor-turned-writer.
Charles Simic has been around for along time and has seen a great deal. He was born in Belgrade in 1938 and his early years were spent, with his family, as displaced people in war-torn Europe.
Motherlode, the fictional dusty California gold-rush town whose evolution Mary Volmer portrays so charmingly in her debut novel, is a character of its own—a gawky preteen of a sort, a formerly happ
Katie Kampenfelt is smart, but not educated. She’s sassy, erratic, impulsive, and yet totally honest with the readers of her blog. She types away at her computer telling us the story of her life.
What if Franklin Delano Roosevelt, instead of winning a third term as president, had been defeated by the Republican candidate Charles Lindbergh, the celebrated aviator and “America First” isolatio
All set in the space of a day, The Infinities tells a tale of the Godleys as they gather at Arden, the family home, at the sick bed of Adam, the husband and father.
Contrary to expectations, Tolstoy’s well-known line from Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” does not apply to Rachel Cusk’s nove
There are probably tens of thousands of Americans whose parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were members of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations in the nineteen twenties, t
In her new novel, House Rules, Jodi Picoult serves up another courtroom drama, intricately woven through an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a family in crisis.
Five Days Apart succeeds for many reasons, not the least of which is the author’s spot-on evocation of a specific time and place: Dublin, Ireland, in the nineties.
Eddie Signwriter is a book about choices—personal, interpersonal and communal. Do we determine the course of our lives or do our environmental circumstances dicate our direction and fate?
Dara Horn has written a novel set in the Civil War. We are given a view of the Jewish community of that time through well-developed characters who are pulled and pushed by the conflict.
The cover tag to this book reads, “The Lost Mike Hammer Sixties Novel.” It’s an appropriate definition as The Big Bang is set smack dab in the middle of that rocking decade when free love
