Watch Out for the Thin Places

So let's just say, for example, that you're driving along and all of a sudden there are these blinding lights in the sky. And they're not moving like any aircraft that you know of. And once they disappear into the night sky, just as quickly as they appeared, you look around and notice you're about 100 miles off course, and it's now 11pm, when you know for a fact that just a few minutes ago you had looked at the clock and it had been 9. Can you accept the ambiguity and the realization that ...

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Mikhail Shishkin’s 'Maidenhair': Sifting the Desperate Lies from the Truth

It is someone’s job to listen to the atrocities suffered and witnessed by refugees and decide whether or not that person is lying. Whether that person will be granted amnesty, or whether that person will be sent back into the landscape they had just escaped. In Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair, this is Peter’s job. He took over after the woman who held the job before him became too credulous, believing every horrible story of torture, rape, and murder, lying awake at night unable to stop picturing them all, and granting asylum to everyone.

So now Peter must listen ...

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Utopias, Dystopias and 'Arcadia': A Conversation with Lauren Groff

Arcadia is a place somewhere up in the northern woods. Perhaps it's around Chautauqua, where 19th-century communards read each other poetry while fussing and feuding. Or maybe it neighbors the vales of the Burnt-Over District, where a dozen dissenting American religions sprang up. No matter the specifics, Arcadia is a place where you can feel the wind blowing from a distant Great Lake, a place where you can feel every barometric shift in the air of personal relations. It’s paradise, and it’s sometimes scary and weird—ripe ground, that is to say, for a skilled storyteller such ...

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Gillian Flynn on 'Gone Girl,' Toxic Marriages and Film Adaptations

“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.”

So opens Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, creepily enough. The tale of a disappearance and the web of suspicion it casts over a small town and its apparently orderly citizenry, Flynn's novel has met with both strong sales and critical praise. Kirkus praised it as “one of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it.” We recently caught up with Flynn to chat about her book and its fright-making qualities.

Browse more of the best thrillers of 2012

By all appearances ...

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Bill Willingham's 'Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland'

Writer Bill Willingham’s Fables, from DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, is one of the longest-running and most popular creator-owned comic-book series of all time. The story of folklore and fairy tale characters making their way in the modern world has gone on for more than 120 issues and spawned spin-offs including comics series Jack of Fables and Fairest, prose novel Peter and Max and now the graphic novel Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland, which finds popular Fables character Bigby Wolf confronting a town full of werewolves. Willingham talked to Kirkus about the inspiration for the new book, its ...

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Elizabeth Bowen, One Tough Old Bird

Occasionally, the stars align and you are presented with the exact book you were in that moment needing. Or, as Arthur Koestler put it, “I have always believed that in the administration of Divine Providence there is a special department entirely concerned with seeing that the right book comes into the hands of a reader at the right moment."

I started reading Elizabeth Bowen on the train from Dublin to Cork, my first return trip in seven years to a city where I had once lived. I don't remember what made me pack – or even buy – The Death of ...

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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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Indie Author Johnny Townsend on 'Marginal Mormons'

Author Johnny Townsend has written a number of books featuring a diverse cast of characters who are all struggling to reconcile their beliefs to the doctrines of the Mormon church. In his book of short stories, Marginal Mormons, Townsend is at his best as he presents a fascinating set of realistic, relatable people who reside outside the “norm,” at odds with the faith due to their lifestyles and choices. While many of Townsend’s stories focus on homosexuality and the lack of acceptance demonstrated by most mainstream Mormons, the author also addresses a variety of other issues. Townsend’s work ...

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Sherlock Holmes at 125

It was an inspired but utterly accidental moment when Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor struggling to establish himself both as a physician and as a writer in late Victorian London, drew upon the habits of an irascible medical school mentor to concoct a character that he pegged as a “consulting detective,” an utterly newfangled job description.

Doyle blended those habits with the conventions of a genre then only a few decades old—and pioneered by the then nearly forgotten American writer Edgar Allan Poe—to produce the figure he called Sherlock Holmes, rangy, distracted, drug-addicted, much more at home ...

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Barbara Kingsolver's 'Flight Behavior'

Award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver is one of those authors whose work inspires profound affection in the hearts of her readers.

Best known for her Pulitzer-nominated novel The Poisonwood Bible and nonfiction works like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, her work is rich in science, politics, texture and character. She is also proudly the founder of the Bellwether Prize to support unpublished novelists writing literature about social change.

Check out our recent interview with Emma Donoghue about her new short story collection, 'Astray.'

Her latest, Flight Behavior, draws on Kingsolver’s origins as a curious and highly trained biologist. It opens on the ...

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A Conversation With Mark Z. Danielewski

It’s a disturbing little tale, but isn’t that what we’ve come to expect from Mark Z. Danielewski? We’ve also come to expect visual trickery, this being the man who colored every instance of the word “house” blue in House of Leaves and required you to spin the book in your hands to follow the text as it climbed the sides and spiralled inward.

His latest story is no less intense, no less strange, no less visually captivating. The Fifty Year Sword is a ghost story of sorts, told in one night in East Texas. A stranger ...

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'Astray': Emma Donoghue Writes with Wanderlust

Following on the heels of 2010’s gripping international best-seller Room, Emma Donoghue straddles genres once again to produce Astray, a seamless collection of 14 tales populated by far-flung wanderers in search of true meaning. Donoghue, an Irish emigrant now residing in Canada and known for her brilliant historical fiction, discusses the allure of the aimless, the short story process, how history molds her themes and how “Room” still gets mistakenly compared to several gruesome kidnapping cases of the past. With delightful amity and a cheery brogue, Donoghue chatted with Kirkus about what fuels the continued mastery of her craft ...

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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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Hilary Mantel Wins Her Second Man Booker Prize

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel was announced Tuesday as the winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize for "rewrit[ing] the rules for historical fiction." According to Sir Peter Stothard, this year's chief judge, "in Bring Up the Bodies, our greatest modern writer retells the origins of modern England."

The Man Booker Prize, which has been awarded annually since 1969, celebrates the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, The Commonwealth and The Republic of Ireland. Past winners include Julian Barnes for his 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending and ...

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British Novelist Howard Jacobson on Being the Jewish Jane Austen

Howard Jacobson has been around for a good while, a student and creator of fine literature, but it seems as if he burst onto the literary scene only recently with a spate of rollicking novels about quotidian life in modern Britain, mostly as lived by men of a decidedly, well, shlimazel tenor. Those novels, among them No More Mr. Nice Guy, The Mighty Walzer, and The Finkler Question, have been famously well received both commercially and critically, the last earning Jacobson the Man Booker Prize.

His newest, Zoo Time, continues Jacobson’s travels into the picaresque that lies behind the ...

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Mo Yan Awarded 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

Chinese author Mo Yan was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature Thursday. The committee cited Yan, a pseudonym for Guan Moye, as an author "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."

According to his Nobel biography, Yan was born to farmers in northeastern China in 1955. He left school at age 12 to work alongside his parents in the fields before joining the People's Liberation Army in 1976.  His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981, followed by his breakthrough novella, Touming de hong luobo in 1986.

His first novel ...

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J.R. Moehringer on 'Sutton' and Bank Robbery as an American Pursuit

In his debut novel, J.R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar, 2006, etc.) delves into the mythology of legendary bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton. During a lifelong criminal career, Sutton stole more than two million dollars and cashed in on the urban legend that he robbed banks because, “That’s where the money is.” Sutton captures this cipher on Christmas Day in 1969, when a New York reporter takes the aging bandit on a tour of the sites of his most famous exploits.

After chasing the author for weeks, Kirkus finally caught up with him in Denver, where the conversation ...

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Tonino Benacquista on Writing Women in 'The Thursday Night Men'

I admit to being a little trepidatious about Tonino Benacquista’s novel The Thursday Night Men. I had just stopped reading a book halfway through where every female character was reduced to her sexual assets; if a woman was not supposed to be sexy, she was described as fat, hideous, monstrous, like an ogre. So a book about men talking about their women problems? Populated by a long string of prostitutes? It could have gone bad. Maxim magazine bad. Spur Posse bad.

But Benacquista is the man responsible for the beautiful movie The Beat That My Heart Skipped as well ...

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A Cornucopia of Surprises with Graphic Artist Chris Ware

Over the last quarter-century, Chris Ware has built a sterling reputation as a maker of graphic novels, some borrowing from their comic-book sources and some looking ahead into the museum galleries of the future, all working with themes of urban alienation. Small wonder that his new masterwork, Building Stories, finds Ware visiting a world of sometimes bewildered, sometimes unhappy people living in an overstuffed apartment building on the edge of downtown Chicago. All strive, but all endure.

Browse more of the top 25 fiction books of 2012

Recently, Kirkus caught up with Ware to ask him a few questions about ...

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Not My Cuppa Butterbeer: J.K. Rowling's 'The Casual Vacancy'

If J.K. Rowling consciously set out to write a book to prove that she is not limited to child-wizard fantasy—and I think that’s entirely likely—she has succeeded with The Casual Vacancy. But not magically, and readers who hope to find something of Harry within its pages won’t.

Like most of the publishing industry, I’ve had half an eye on the loudly trumpeted first adult book by the author of the much-beloved and billion-selling Harry Potter series. It wasn’t a particularly skeptical eye, either. As Clayton Moore described last week, plenty of authors have ...

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