Spoiler Alert

Call me crazy, but spoilers don’t bother me. I remember years ago just blinking when a librarian colleague complained that a review she’d read revealed the end of a book. She asked me whether I thought it wasn’t the duty of the reviewer to keep key plot points under wraps, and my utter lack of response visibly frustrated her. It just hadn’t occurred to me.

Some background is probably in order. The vast majority of my review reading has been done as a professional librarian, when I typically read four or five different review journals in ...

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Strange But True

Charles Graeber’s The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder is the most terrifying book published this year. It is also one of the most thoughtful. The Good Nurse is the nonfiction account of the many murders committed by Charles Cullen (even though Cullen eventually confessed and helped the police identify his victims, he killed so many people that it is difficult to know exactly how many he murdered, although experts say the number is approximately 400, which makes him the most prolific serial killer in American history). Cullen wasn’t the mercy-killing nurse who pops ...

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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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World Conquerors, Self-Publishers

Ryan and Colin Pyle, whose full-throttle travelogue debut The Middle Kingdom Ride details their circumnavigation of China on motorcycles, grew up in and around Toronto. Children of divorce, Ryan spent his formative years with their father, while Colin remained with their mother. Although they were only three years apart and, at one point, fellow students in the same high school, they were never fully fraternal. They were further separated by Ryan’s decision to relocate to China, where he met his wife, Jasmine, started a family and pursued a self-taught career in photojournalism, shooting images of his adoptive homeland for ...

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Robert Frank's The Americans

It’s a commonplace of anthropology that it often takes an outsider to show a group of insiders what it’s up to. One of the best books I know concerning Catholic pilgrimage in Europe, for instance, was written by a Jewish scholar from Brooklyn. One of the most compelling books ever written about the Arab world was written by a shy young man from the minor Irish nobility. An Italian Jesuit penetrated the mysteries of early modern China. And so on, all pointing to the fact that sometimes we need the Other to show us just how otherly we ...

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Naming the Monster

When novelist Meg Medina talks about her own experiences with bullying, the pain in her voice is still acute. “There's a shame to it,” she says, quietly. “You start to wonder if there really is something wrong with you.”

The title and first line of Medina's new book, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, is taken nearly word for word from a threat Medina received as a teenager. “Someone approached me and said, 'So and so is going to kick your ass.' And I had no idea who that person was, no clue why I was targeted ...

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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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The People on the Pedestals

For those with a boundless appetite for stories of the weird, relatively short-lived American aristocracy ­(i.e., most of us), the stateside Astor family – with its British lineage and its fur-trading origins; its glittering days as “New York’s landlords”; its invention of the luxury hotel; its passel of (rather wealthy) orphans; its Titanic drowning; its name still found up and down the streets, buildings, and boroughs of New York City; and, most recently, the scandal surrounding the will of perhaps its last famous member, extreme socialite Brooke Astor – is rich territory for seekers of both soap opera and schadenfreude ...

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A Long, Epic Latin American Shadow

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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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Where ZOM-Bs Come From

Bestselling writer Darren Shan gave this talk at the American Library Association Midwinter conference earlier this year. Today, with the release of the latest book in his ZOM-B series, ZOM-B City, we’re sharing Shan’s talk, which reveals the origins of his fascination with zombies (hint: it wasn’t zombies!).

I want to talk about my new series, Zom-B, today, but before I get around to it, I want to go back to some of my early influences, to give you an idea of why I write the sorts of books that I do, and why there’s more ...

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Spread the Good News (to the Past)

In large measure, the experience of a common, cooperative humanity is to conventional historians what “good news” is to journalists: an accepted reality too lacking in drama to be interesting. What V.S. Naipaul termed “that missing large idea of human association” is the overarching subject of Sir David Cannadine’s The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences.

“They take it for granted and do not write about it,” says Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. “But historically, there is quite a lot of good news.”

Cannadine mines the strata of religion, nation, class, gender, race and “civilization ...

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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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Don't Fence Him In

Guy Gavriel Kay has some problems with historical fiction, the genre people don’t necessarily put him in so much as place him unquestioningly alongside.

“I don’t like it when you’re reading a novel set in some far past and you look at the characters and think ‘Oh, that’s us,’” he tells me, “when you just have moderns dressed up in period clothing.”

No one familiar with Kay’s work, which usually revolves around elements of the fantastic injected into a historical analog (settings are reminiscent of Moorish Spain, Medieval France, and Song-dynasty China), could accuse his ...

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Back Story: Social Media Maven Nisa Burns’ Success Story

Even though I never dreamed in a million years that I would become a professional chef—or a cookbook author—my love of food goes way back, to a very young age.

When I was a little girl, my grammy used to hand my sister and I a bowl and a spoon, saying “Make whatever you want! If it's good, we'll eat it; if it's gross, we'll throw it down the drain.” This resulted in many failed experiments, of course, but she instilled in me a sense of creativity when it comes to food, and that ...

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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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The Boldest Leap

Elizabeth Scarboro’s memoir, My Foreign Cities, opens with a great leap. It is summer and the author has scrambled up the rocks of Boulder Canyon with her boyfriend, Stephen, who quickly takes the plunge into the swimming hole below. Scarboro is more cautious. If she turns back, she will have to navigate the slippery rocks she has just scaled.  She inches toward the ledge. She pauses, and then she jumps.

It’s an evocative introduction to Scarboro, a young woman who always wanted a life of adventure—ideally, as she writes in high school, “as an international journalist, moving ...

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