fiction – Page 47

Review: The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

February 25, 2009 admin 0

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. Says Leach: Wolitzer’s terrific novel follows the lives of four women who have left the workforce to raise children. Amy Lamb, Jill Hamlin, Roberta Sokolov and Karen Yip are all talented, highly educated, happily married New Yorkers when their babies arrive. And those babies change everything. Suddenly the twelve-week maternity leave is insufficient; each woman, with varying […]

Author Snapshot: Elizabeth Kelly

February 23, 2009 admin 0

Elizabeth Kelly’s overnight sensation status need not come as a surprise: a magazine editor and award-winning journalist, Kelly has spent a lifetime wrangling words. That shows in her debut novel, Apologize, Apologize!, an in-depth visit with the dysfunctional Flanagans, an old money Massachusetts family with many branches and quite a lot of dogs. Apologize, Apologize! is charming, funny, accomplished and oddly muscular. And it seems likely that Apologize, Apologize! will only be the beginning for […]

New this Month: Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster

February 21, 2009 admin 1

It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here — Australia in the Victorian era — is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine. The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading […]

Author Snapshot: Alan Bradley

February 11, 2009 admin 1

Most recent book: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the PieBorn: Toronto, OntarioReside: Kelowna, British ColumbiaBirthday: October 10thWeb site: www.flaviadeluce.com What’s your favorite city?London, England. You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?Squeeze in a visit to all of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s remaining churches. That’s a church an hour. What food do you love?Egg salad sandwiches. What food have you vowed never to touch again?Mushrooms.What’s on your nightstand? Conceit, by Mary Novik, […]

New Today: Mr. Darcy’s Dream by Elizabeth Aston

February 3, 2009 admin 0

One of the most amazing things about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is how, almost 200 years after the death of the author, her characters continue to inspire others to enter her world, sometimes in the most public of ways. Some of the fanfic inspired by Austen’s work is the very worst of fanfic of any kind: weak little pastiches that barely captures the flavor of Austen’s work, let alone the comforting majesty. And then […]

Author Snapshot: Maria Semple

January 30, 2009 admin 0

Most recent book: This One Is MineBorn: Los AngelesReside: SeattleBirthday: May 21, 1964Web site: www.mariasemple.com What’s your favorite city? Aspen, Colorado You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do? Anything, so long as I’m outside and covered with sunblock. What food do you love? What food don’t I love, is more the question. I’m a vegetarian and I consider bacon one of my favorite foods.What food have you vowed never to […]

War and Peace and War and Peace and War and…

January 24, 2009 admin 2

For all of my adult years, I have been searching out new-to-me translations of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. It’s like a hobby with me, or some odd type of life mission. (Odd, at least, to judge by the faces of people when you tell them such a thing. “Oh,” they most often say. “Really.”) Reading multiple translations of War and Peace becomes a study in linguistics and a crash course in the power […]

New in Paperback: Life Class by Pat Barker

January 14, 2009 admin 0

It’s difficult to imagine a more perfectly soft backdrop over which to juxtapose the harsh outlines of war: an art class — actually, a life class — in the summer of 1914 and a group of friends in art school forever touched and altered by the onset of war: the first Great One.Pat Barker, winner of the Booker Prize (for 1995’s magnificent The Ghost Road), here revisits some of the territory she covered in her […]

Author Snapshot: Laura Benedict

January 2, 2009 admin 0

Most recent book: Calling Mr. Lonely HeartsBorn: Cincinnati, OhioReside: Southern IllinoisBirthday: July 2Web site: laurabenedict.com What’s your favorite city?I’ve never been there, but I think it would probably be Florence, Italy. You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?Visit the Uffizzi, the Galleria (where Michelangelo’s David is), and the Ponte Vecchio. What food do you love?Dark chocolate. What food have you vowed never to touch again?Olives. My grandfather was mad for […]

Best Books of 2008: Fiction

December 28, 2008 admin 0

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow) 960 pagesNeal Stephenson’s Anathem is a weighty tome which completes, in part, his spelunking through the underpinnings of the current century. The avout live in a Concent regulated by time. It becomes necessary for one of them, Erasmus, to venture into the world where he discovers that some of the core beliefs are based on untruths and comes into contact with aliens who ask the same questions that he […]