This Could Be Her Last

Jeannette Walls is through with writing. She says so herself, in between laughs: “I’ll never write another book. I’m through, I’m finished—I’ve got nothing left to say.” But in the next breath, she admits something that should provide comfort to any fan distraught at the thought of her absence from the literary world: “I also said that after my last two books, so don’t believe anything I say.” She adds, amid more boisterous laughter, “It’s not that I’m a liar. I’m just wishy-washy.”

After both The Glass Castle and Half Broke ...

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Execution of a Daydream

By the time Elizabeth Kelly published her first novel, Apologize, Apologize!, at 56, she’d written seven or eight full books, and thought of herself as a novelist since she was a kid. “I was swaggering around like Martin Amis for years with no justification,” she says.

In her early 20s, Kelly, who lives in Ontario, became a magazine journalist, and quite a successful one. “But then suddenly, in my 30s, it was like a switch went on, and I started writing,” she says. She kept working as a journalist and editor—not to mention as mother to four kids ...

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Unlikeable but Unforgettable

One of the questions many of the most talked-about recently published novels has raised is whether a main character of a novel must be likable in order for readers to follow him or her through a book. From calculating Amy Dunne in Gone Girl to angry Nora Eldridge in The Woman Upstairs, the answer seems to be a resounding no. That’s good news for Noa P. Singleton, the protagonist of Elizabeth L. Silver’s first novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton. Erudite, caustic, and seemingly resigned to her terminal status, Noa is not a warm and cuddly narrator ...

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A Special Privilege

Transatlantic, the new novel from Colum McCann, makes leaps across decades, in between points of view and in and out of fact as it incorporates the real-life transatlantic voyages of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, pioneering aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, and peace negotiator Senator George Mitchell with those of four generations of fictional women. Writing it, McCann says, brought him face-to-face with the troubling nature of historical truth.

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The Time Traveller

When I call Anton DiSclafani, I almost expect her to answer in a frail, quivering, 90-year-old voice, though I know it would be absurd if she did. DiSclafani’s picture on the back cover of her debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, clearly shows a 30-something with a mop of thick black hair, a wide smile, and not a wrinkle in sight. But I’m convinced that really, she’s an old soul beneath that young façade. It’s the only explanation for how she can write so naturally about life in the 1930’s at the ...

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Cold War Kids

In 1982, 10-year-old Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov soon after he took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, asking for answers about the rising tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. The letter was subsequently published in the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, and about five months later, Andropov responded with a much-publicized letter and invitation for Smith and her family to visit his country. Smith swiftly transformed into the media sensation of the moment, being interviewed by the major networks, penning a book, becoming the youngest peace ambassador to ...

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Full Immersion Births The Son

Philipp Meyer is an avid outdoorsman—he’s a skilled hunter, and says he's comfortable camping pretty much anywhere, as long as he has a rifle, a sleeping bag and a tent. So he thought he’d have a leg up when he set out to write his second novel, The Son, a highly anticipated multi-generational saga spanning most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each of its narratives in some way tied intrinsically to the physical land of Texas. He bought more than 350 books, on everything from Texas folklore to Native American plant usage, and thought that ...

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Sister, Friend, Chimp

Karen Joy Fowler begins her sixth novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by inviting – OK, requiring – that the reader delve into the middle of the story. “Skip the beginning. Start in the middle,” says the book’s narrator, Rosemary Cooke, in the prologue. “The middle of my story comes in the winter of 1996,” Rosemary, then college-aged, explains at the start of Chapter One.

Fowler’s narrative structure may depart from the norm but so does the Cooke family. Rosemary’s sister, Fern, disappears when she’s five years old. In response, Rosemary shuts herself inside herself and all ...

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Write What You Want to Know

Robert Chatham has a rough childhood: his brother is hanged for seducing a white girl, a flood wipes out his home, and his parents abandon him. Unfortunately, his troubles are just beginning. Many disasters befall Robert over the course of Bill Cheng’s debut novel, Southern Cross the Dog, but the strangest is the titular animal, which follows Robert on his adventures across the interwar South—perhaps persecuting him or perhaps protecting him. The true nature of the dog is never entirely clear, and Cheng is reluctant to clarify. “Is it a physical thing that’s there, or is it ...

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War, Away From the Front Line

At the periphery of war, lingering emotional casualties and conflicts go largely unrecorded. Masha Hamilton, a former Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, knows this firsthand. In her fifth novel, What Changes Everything, the current Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul skips the harrowing details of bombs and body counts in favor of addressing psychological wounds that can be more permanent.

Todd Barbery, an American working with a humanitarian organization in modern-day Afghanistan is kidnapped, not long after he has promised his wife, Clarissa, that he will soon return home. The event ...

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Matter-of-Fact Yet Slightly Off

When Tom Drury and I meet on the Upper East Side, we can’t find any place to sit. I’d forgotten about the lunch rush and most places are too busy and loud to accommodate us. After following Drury for a block, he finally finds a dark, empty bar that meets his specifications. We settle into a burgundy booth in the back, where a skylight lets in wan afternoon light that barely penetrates the darkness below. The place has the same vaguely unsettling air as Drury’s books.

Drury’s fiction is perhaps best described as uncanny. The world ...

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What's Essential

“That house on the hill. That girl. Children are like bombs that will one day go off.”

These brief sentences, written soon after turning in her first book for publication, inspired Gail Godwin’s Flora, finally brought to life after many years hidden in a notebook. Godwin is not the same writer she was when she started out nearly 45 years ago. For one, she’s not afraid to refashion a book anymore. “It used to kill me when I had to drop a book, but sometimes I found that I could pick out pieces of it and ...

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Late American Bloomer

Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower is a balance of intense character studies and a window into a rapidly changing world. Set before, during and after World War II in Sydney, Australia, The Watch Tower begins when sisters Clare and Laura Vaizey are forced to leave boarding school because their father has died. Clare is only nine, but Laura is in her late teens and gets a job in a cardboard box factory. Soon after, their detached mother announces she’s returning to her native England. Fearing poverty, Laura winds up marrying her boss, Felix Shaw, more than 20 years ...

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Hope Merchants and Dream Chasers

When I call A. Igoni Barrett on the phone, he’s in Lagos, Nigeria—not because he’s visiting his native country but because, unlike most successful Nigerian writers, he still lives there.  “The stories I want to tell are Nigerian,” he says.  “By leaving, I suspect I’d lose something important.”

Barrett has won prizes and been anthologized in the West, and his already acclaimed short story collection Love Is Power or Something Like That (which Kirkus starred) will be released in the States this month. But this doesn’t mean the author makes it easy on American readers ...

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Ghosts of War

“On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father,” writes Anthony Marra in the opening sentence of his stunning debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, “Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” At the onset of this sweeping tale, eight-year-old Havaa is taken by a longtime family friend from her rural village in the woods of Chechnya to a bombed-out hospital as a temporary refuge.

The harrowing story continues to unfold amid the two brutal wars of Chechnya between 1994 and 2004 as the author agilely alternates among the perspectives of six characters: the ...

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Liar, Liar

We’ve all had the unsettling feeling that comes over us when we realize the person speaking to us might be…well…a liar.  Your mind spins, trying to piece the story into a true one, your stomach clenches, and you start to plan your getaway.  But once in a while, a liar’s story is so damn compelling that you can’t stop listening, no matter how clammy your palms.  And Rose Baker, the protagonist of Suzanne Rindell’s first novel, The Other Typist, which Kirkus starred, is one of these most dangerous narrators.

Rose is a 1920s police ...

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Like Her or Not

On the grandiose end of the spectrum of self-delusion, Hitler genuinely thought of himself as good. “Nobody is a villain to themselves,” says novelist Claire Messud. In a menacing evil voice she mocks how real “bad guys” don’t stand around rubbing their hands together declaring, “I am evil.” Instead they battle their own tunnel vision like her new protagonist Nora Eldridge. Although Nora is not remotely as deplorable as Hitler, readers will deeply struggle with liking her. And how much does that fact matter? “It generally seems like we’re in a moment of cultural lunacy where it’s ...

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Strange Dream

Brian Kimberling is a true magpie. “I am a collector of experiences,” he explains, talking about his debut Snapper, a collection centered around an amateur birdwatcher and the state of Indiana. “Some are my own observations or memories. Some are details from stories that I re-imagine. Some are just anecdotes based on my friend's old car."

In a breath, Snapper is just that: a series of non-sequential vignettes bound by the protagonist Nathan Lochmueller, an accidental birdwatcher, keen observer and droll cynic. Lochmueller is a sponge, ready to absorb the insane cast of characters, settings, and circumstances Kimberling throws ...

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Like Mother, (Not) Like Daughter

When she was 15 years old, digging around where she shouldn’t have been, Anna Stothard found an old box of her mother’s love letters. The letters, which weren’t from her father, were all signed “Douglas” or simply “D."

Stothard read those letters over and over, puzzling over who could have written them. Eventually, after recognizing a few unusual phrases about aliens and Galactic bureaucracy, Stothard realized the letters were from Douglas Adams. Yes, that Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and, coincidentally, one of Stothard’s favorite authors. Flash forward 15 years ...

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Start Over? Think Again.

The stunning opening of Jean Thompson’s latest novel, The Humanity Project, makes it clear that we’re in the hands of a writer who knows what she’s doing—and knows us, as a nation, all too well. In the first of three passages that mark the novel’s sections, she lays out the cultural desperation and frustrations that ail us, cataloging all that we fear. First, “our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures,” and next, our neighbors, “who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.

But we ...

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