The Other Side of Jay Neugeboren's World

The original starred Kirkus review praised Jay Neugeboren’s The Other Side of the World, the latest from the veteran, prolific author, by saying that, “Neugeboren presents a meditation on life, love, art and family relationships that’s reminiscent of the best of John Updike.” Its central relationship involves the itinerant Charlie Eisner, his professor father Max, and a notorious novelist, Seana O’ Sullivan, who was Max’s student and who becomes involved with both of them. Charlie also has a complicated relationship with Nick, his close friend and perhaps rival, who was married to and divorced from Charlie’s ...

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Jami Attenberg on Midwestern Jews, Obesity and Happy Endings

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is one of the funniest novels of the year. It is also one of the saddest, filled with sad characters doing sad things and meeting sad fates. The female protagonist, an accomplished lawyer in suburban Chicago, is in the process of eating herself to death, alienating her husband and exasperating her two children. “She was a smart woman,” writes Attenberg, “even though she was also so incredibly stupid.” The starred Kirkus review praised this as “a sharp-tongued, sweet-natured masterpiece of Jewish family life.”

Check out our recent interview with Howard Jacobson about his new novel ...

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Modern Family

Our review lauded British author Mark Haddon's The Red House as “a novel to savor,” saying that “the plot feels organic rather than contrived, the characters convincing throughout, the tone compassionate and the writing wise.”

The third novel is the best from an author who initially wrote children’s books, enjoyed a critical and commercial breakthrough with 2003’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and experienced something of a sophomore slump with its follow-up, A Spot of Bother. Narrative voice remains a key to Haddon’s fiction, as he juggles the novel’s point of ...

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Richard Ford Talks ‘Canada’

A starred Kirkus review praised Richard Ford’s Canada as “a great American novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author.” It may well be his best, certainly his most powerful since 1995’s Independence Day.

The mother and father of 15-year-old twins, living in Montana, inexplicably (or perhaps inevitably) commit a bank robbery. Their son narrates the novel, from his memories 50 years later, within the Canadian exile where he has distanced himself from his parents’ legacy, and where he has progressed from innocence to a recognition of how little he once knew—and what more he might possibly know ...

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‘The Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll’ and Bruce Springsteen

It’s not surprising that a generation of academics raised on rock should combine a fan’s passion with a scholar’s analytical scrutiny in books that are neither conventional biography nor standard music criticism. 

Read more new celebrity memoirs and bios. 

In the wake of such high-profile work in “Dylan studies” such as Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz and Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks comes Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock 'n’ Roll by Marc Dolan, a career-spanning collection by a professor of English and American Studies. Dolan’s perspective isn’t journalistic ...

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Toni Morrison’s ‘Home’

The starred Kirkus review praises Toni Morrison’s Home as “deceptively rich,” without elaborating on the nature—or at the levels—of the deception.

Read more new and notable fiction this May.

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist hasn’t attempted any card tricks with the novel, pulled rabbits out of her sleeve or sawed her protagonist in half. But she’s a magician nonetheless, and this small novel underscores the oversized scope of her virtuosity.

What’s initially deceptive about the novel is the generic setup. For “generic” is just about the last thing you’d expect from the Nobel Prize-winning ...

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‘Tangles’ Tells Story of Alzheimer’s in Graphic Form

Canadian author Sarah Leavitt makes an emotionally powerful debut with Tangles, a graphic memoir of how Alzheimer’s disease transformed not only her late mother but the entire family dynamic. 

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Both honesty and humor pervade the work, which should provide insight and comfort for readers who find themselves facing similar challenges. In a starred review, we said that it was “not simply the story of a disease, but of the flawed, complex, intelligent people whose lives it transformed.”

Why did you decide that the graphic medium was best suited to this sort of memoir ...

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Franzen: Literature, Death, Birdwatching

A reader could divide the selections in Farther Away, the latest essay collection by Jonathan Franzen, into two distinct categories: birds and books. 

Or, a little more specifically, birders—“birdwatchers,” to those who don’t share the passion—and literary writers. But since the author self-identifies as each, I’d suspect he might reject such duality and instead thematically unite these essays under a single classification:

Endangered species.

Read more new and notable nonfiction this April.

For Franzen is a rare bird, one who is both the birdwatcher and the self-proclaimed “literary writer,” and positions himself apart from the culture ...

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Swift at His Finest in ‘Wish You Were Here’

The richness of everyday life provides seemingly inexhaustible possibility within the novels of Graham Swift, whose Wish You Were Here ranks with his best. It’s a novel of rural England, where destinies appear to be preordained, yet every life, and every decision within it, so profoundly affects so many others. 

A man mourns the death of his brother, a soldier in Iraq with whom he’d lost contact, and the delicate balance of his existence begins to topple, threatening everything from his marriage to his memories. Few novelists show more subtle mastery than Swift, whose characters invite the reader ...

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Moody’s Take on Music

Though some novelists treat nonfiction collections as a busman’s holiday or career stop-gap, it’s plain from the engagement and incisiveness of these critical essays in On Celestial Music that Rick Moody cares as passionately about music as much as he does fiction. 

Read more of Rick Moody's books.

The author of The Ice Storm (1994) and Purple America (1997) began his career with an award-winning novel steeped in what would late be called “indie rock” (Garden State, 1991). Here, he runs the gamut of music he loves, from Meredith Monk to Wilco, from Otis Redding to the ...

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Writing ‘Dwight Yoakam’

Writing a book can go so wrong in so many ways that it’s amazing when it turns out so right. I’m thinking here of logistical complications rather than quality, though I am proud of Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, particularly since the whole project threatened to crash and burn before it even took off.

(Ed note: Full disclosure, McLeese is a contributing writer for Kirkus).

I was checking messages before boarding my flight to Los Angeles to interview Yoakam when I heard an urgent one from his manager, Laura McCorkindale: Please call me as soon as ...

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Being Jonathan Lethem

One of the reasons that Jonathan Lethem attracts such passionate devotion is that he expresses such passionate devotion, such persuasive advocacy. He has done so implicitly in the novels that built his loyal fan base—from his debut, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), through his popular breakthrough with Motherless Brooklyn (1999), through his most recent and debatably his best novel, Chronic City (2009). 

Read more Best of 2011 Nonfiction.

Though Lethem is no polemicist in his fiction, it is difficult to read his novels without recognizing the arguments he makes for blurring conventional categories, for transcending the limits of the ...

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Attack of the Zombies in ‘Zone One’

The latest from the unpredictable Colson Whitehead, whose last book was the coming-of-age Sag Harbor, is the zombie novel Zone One. Yet it’s also a provocative piece of both literature and cultural commentary, set in a post-plague future that in some ways seems spookily like the present. The humor has as much bite as some of the characters.

Read more zombie books at Kirkus.

Why do you think zombies have such resonance within contemporary culture?

I stopped doing the "Why is X hot now?" trend piece thing when I stopped being a critic—it's a lot more fun ...

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Chuck Klosterman: ‘The Visible Man’

As a cultural journalist, Chuck Klosterman has proven almost as polarizing, mainly with older readers, as he is popular, mostly with post-baby boomers, particularly those more prone to embracing Kiss and hair bands than deifying the Beatles. 

Read more can't-miss fiction for fall. 

Now that Klosterman’s turned his attention toward fiction, we called his second novel The Visible Man “a big leap” and “far more daring and ambitious than his debut novel (Downtown Owl, 2008).” It concerns the relationship between an Austin, Texas-based therapist and a patient who is either uniquely delusional, has a unique power, or both ...

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Perrotta Explores the Rapture’s Aftermath in ‘The Leftovers’

Tom Perrotta has expanded his audience through film adaptations of his novels (Little Children, Election), but The Leftovers, the novel that we called “his most ambitious book to date,” merits a popular breakthrough before it inspires a movie.

As he’s done before, Perrotta treats his characters with empathy, illuminating the human dimension of issues that often prove polarizing. Here, he focuses on those left behind by “the Rapture” after the predicted ascension comes true and leaves big holes in the characters’ lives as they struggle to deal with the ineffable.

Read more of the best of 2011's top ...

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Bob Mould on 'See a Little Light'

Amid the recent spate of bestselling rock memoirs, Bob Mould may not have the widespread name recognition of a Keith Richards, Eric Clapton or Steven Tyler. But as someone whose music with Hüsker Dü, Sugar and as a solo artist provided a bridge between the punk insurgence of the Ramones and the popular breakthrough of Nirvana, Mould has a provocative, reflective and revelatory story to tell in See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody. 

Read more great rock books at Kirkus.

As he details his tumultuous childhood and the challenges of coming to terms with his ...

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Oscar Hijuelos: Life and writing in 'Thoughts Without Cigarettes'

Within this always engaging, often illuminating memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, the novelist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love comes to terms with his identity in a different way than he has in his fiction. As a light-skinned, American-born son of Cuban immigrants, Oscar Hijuelos long felt that “whatever being Cuban was about, I just didn’t have it.”

Read more new and notable fiction titles for May.

Here, Hijuelos shows how he came to terms with his ethnic legacy and how he developed his voice as a writer, with the help of mentors ...

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Steve Earle: 'I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive'

With his debut novel, I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive, Steve Earle extends the creative renewal that has seen him rise from the ash heap of heroin addiction. Now clean for 16 years since his incarceration, the renowned singer-songwriter hasn’t composed the typical “write what you know” fictionalized memoir, but has conjured a spiritual parable of redemption featuring the ghost of Hank Williams, the fictionalized doctor who treated him, an avenging priest and a young Mexican immigrant who develops miraculous healing powers. The multilayered novel takes place in Earle’s native San Antonio, when President Kennedy ...

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Dispatches From the Ivory Tower

After his essay in the Atlantic Monthly with the same title sparked such an academic furor, the anonymous author responds to his critics and expands his thesis with In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. As an adjunct instructor of introductory writing courses at a couple of colleges, he feels that many of the students he encounters are unsuited and unqualified for higher education, but that they are forced into it, and usually at considerable debt, because of a career market that requires a diploma even when the specific job wouldn’t seem to need it. “They have been abducted ...

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Sarah Vowell's 'Unfamiliar Fishes'

Sarah Vowell breathes life into history. As she did in her well-received The Wordy Shipmates (2008), Vowell brings a distinctive voice—ironic, occasionally acerbic—to Unfamiliar Fishes, an account of how America’s “Manifest Destiny” crossed the Pacific and came to encompass Hawaii. Like Bill Bryson (otherwise a very different writer),Vowell mixes elements of memoir and travel writing, along with a conversational style, to create a book that will never allow the reader to think of Hawaii as quite the same paradise again.

See more books for history buffs interested in similar topics.

How do you see this book ...

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