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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Things Fall Apart (in America)

Three women—a mother, Amaranth, and her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow—flee a burning church, each with her own desires and secrets. Behind them lay the ruins of a polygamous cult led by Zachariah, Amaranth’s husband and the girls’ father; ahead of them stretches the whole of the modern America that the sisters have never seen and the struggling Oklahoma farm of a man named Bradley. Thus begins Peggy Riley’s novel, Amity & Sorrow. From that inciting incident, two narratives unspool—the story of the now broken utopia runs backwards to its happier beginning as the tale of ...

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At the Edge of Visibility

Many of us followed the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity with fascination last August. Since then, Curiosity has been probing Martian rocks to help determine the history of the planet’s water activity. NASA wants to characterize the climate and geology of Mars, but it also wants to understand if life ever existed there—hence the focus on water. This very obsession, rampant in 19^th-century Victorian culture, is the starting point for Ken Kalfus’s mesmerizing new novel Equilateral.

Sanford Thayer, British astronomer and the novel’s protagonist, shares and promotes the 1890s notion that water channels ...

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A Big, Full Book

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Home Is Where the Imagination Is

Nowhere but Home, bestseller Liza Palmer’s Texan tome, is the kind of novel that sucks you in like sweet tea through a straw—the kind where a talented woman realizes her worth and starts living an authentic life. The kind you might call “chick lit,” if you want to be a jerk about it.

“Ah, ‘chick lit.’ The head-patting, oft times said with an annoyed sigh label forced onto women writers who just thought they were writing ‘books,’” says Palmer. “I think Jennifer Weiner said it best: ‘When men write about relationships and family, it's literature, but when ...

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Out of the Funk, Into the Pleasure of Storytelling

“I wouldn’t mind—I mean this is the sheer irony of the thing—but I’m the only person I know who doesn’t think it would be delicious to go in to ‘someplace’ for ‘a rest.’ You’d want to hear my sister Claire going on about it…,” writes Marian Keyes, via her fictional private detective Helen Walsh in her new novel The Mystery of Mercy Close.

And Claire and her friend Judy do go on about it–white orchids, the smell of jasmine, Magnum Gold ice cream, new cotton pajamas every single day, fresh out of the ...

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Nostalgia for Something Unnamed

Readers familiar with André Aciman’s work may be forgiven for assuming that the writer, a teacher of Proust, after all, is a nostalgic and sentimental man, and that his books, from the 1995 memoir Out of Egypt to the new novel Harvard Square, are an attempt to recapture and recast cherished moments from a well enjoyed life. For the Egyptian-born Aciman, though, it is more complicated than that.

“It’s easy to say I’m nostalgic for Egypt or nostalgic for my childhood, but I didn’t like Egypt, and I didn’t like my childhood,” Aciman says, laughing ...

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Hollywood: It’s Not Just for Reptiles

Matthew Specktor is sticking up for a city that writers and filmmakers have been dissing for far too long. “I read wonderful books set in Chicago, London, Brooklyn,” Specktor says. “Shouldn’t Los Angeles be treated on par with those places, and not as an aquarium filled with beautiful but poisonous fish?”

With American Dream Machine, Specktor, author of the novel That Summertime Sound and a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, depicts the movie business, and L.A. proper, in a way that celebrates its humanity and even dignity.

“I’ve worked in Hollywood, that’s ...

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Windows into the Writerly Life

“Writers see you in a way you don’t always see yourself,” Joan Didion told Vendela Vida in a 2011 interview that’s reprinted in Always Apprentices: The Believer Magazine Presents Twenty-Two Conversations Between Writers. Didion’s proposition highlights the complex nature of a writer interviewing another writer, since both are presumably hyperaware of the other’s proclivity for studying the person before them.

Always Apprentices is the third volume of writer interviews from The Believer. The collection features intimate exchanges between fiction writers that took place in the past six years, some through letters or email, others in person ...

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Life Underground, Mysteries Aboveground

We all home in on weird news: the father and daughter with a hidden house in a public park, a man addicted to electric shocks. When the 24-hour cycle turns, these people become lost to us—but not to Peter Rock. With preternatural curiosity and an ability to suspend judgment, he investigates the methods and motives of the fringe, turning their stories into fiction that could be called incredible realism.

In the late 1980s, Rock was mending fences on a Montana ranch abutting lands of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religion led by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. She forecasted a ...

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Writing History, but with the Heart

Last March, Amber Dermont swiftly emerged as a contemporary fiction writer to watch after the publication of her captivating debut novel, The Starboard Sea. The striking narrative garnered many enthusiastic readers and reviews for its sure-handed, authentic prose that vividly depicts the lives and tragedies of the young men and women of Bellingham, a seaside boarding school, in 1987.

A year later, Dermont returns with her first story collection, Damage Control. The novel and collection were apart of a two-book deal with St. Martin’s Press, and a majority of the stories were written amid the writing process of The ...

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Rural Lives, Urban Problems

The adjectives that usually appear when Kent Haruf publishes a new novel will probably appear this month as Benediction, his latest story set on the open, treeless plains of eastern Colorado, is published. “Lovely,” “honest,” “graceful,” “spare,” the reviews tend to say. “Who in America can still write like this? Who else has such confidence and such humility?” Ron Charles asked the last time Haruf had a novel out, Eventide, in 2004.

It’s true that there is no one who writes like Haruf. A native of the Colorado plains, he inhabits the diction, cant, slang, and gruff, clipped phrasing ...

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