This is the fiction segment of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 feature. You can see other sections as follows: Best Non-Fiction, Best Art & Culture, Best Biography, Best Books for Children and Young Adults, Best Cookbooks, Best Science Fiction/Fantasy, Best Crime Fiction (part I) and Best Crime Fiction (part II). 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner) It’s no secret that Stephen King knows how to weave a tight story in short form, and of course […]
This is the art & culture segment of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 feature. You can see other sections as follows: Best Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, Best Biography, Best Books for Children and Young Adults, Best Cookbooks, Best Science Fiction/Fantasy, Best Crime Fiction (part I) and Best Crime Fiction (part II). Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World by John Szwed (Viking)For a good part of the 20th century, folklorist Alan Lomax — at […]
This is the children’s book segment of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 feature. You can see other sections as follows: Best Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, Best Art & Culture, Best Biography, Best Cookbooks, Best Science Fiction/Fantasy, Best Crime Fiction (part I) and Best Crime Fiction (part II). A Sword in Her Hand by Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem and Pat van Beirs (Annick Press)A Sword in Her Hand is deliciously refreshing. No vampires or werewolves, and not […]
As I write this, it is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I have just finished reading Stephen King’s new novel about a man who goes back in time to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from firing the three bullets that would change the world, 11/22/63 (Scribner). What a ride! When high school teacher Jake Epping is convinced by a dying friend to step into the past, he has […]
Who’s to say, when we start a life, where we will end up? What will we do? What will we regret? What, if anything, will we understand? These are a few of the questions posed by Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Award-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. At just 160 pages or so, the book is deceptive. It’s spare but not sparse. It’s short but not light. Instead, it is a rich tapestry of starts, […]
It was like a rock concert. A thousand kids, siblings, and parents, all gathered on sidewalks outside the Barnes & Noble in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Outside, even on this warm night, a pile of snow, with fake snowflakes sprayed by a special machine, and a massive luxury bus decorated with Wimpy Kid art on all sides. And at four o’clock sharp, the rock star emerges from it: Jeff Kinney, author of the bestselling Diary […]
We The Animals (Houghton Mifflin), the first novel by Justin Torres, is a searing series of lightning-flash vignettes that, together, tell the story of three devoted brothers in what appears to be contemporary New York. These mixed-race sons of a battered woman and a barely-making-it father find ways to survive that are nothing less than astounding. And how they do it is by using their imaginations. The things they see — the violence and disappointments […]
Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s new novel, The Language of Flowers (Ballantine), came with a lot of hype. I wasn’t sure it would live up to it.The story jumps back and forth in time, between the childhood and adulthood of a woman named Victoria Jones. As a child, she was shuttled from foster home to foster home, eventually ending up at the farm of Elizabeth, who has familial demons of her own to deal with. As a young […]
Typically, murder mysteries don’t reveal the killer until the end. So when the killer in the new thriller The Hypnotist (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is revealed early on, you sort of think, Well, this book isn’t about what I thought it was. And that, it seems, is the point. The whole book is like that. In fact, even the author is like that. Lars Kepler — or rather, “Lars Kepler” — isn’t one guy. It’s […]
One of the novels we ended up talking a lot about last year was The Passage by Justin Cronin. This was the book that Entertainment Weekly described as “The Stand meets The Road,” a faintly weird comparison that, nonetheless, isn’t without some merit. “OK, I’ll put it right out there,” January Magazine contributing editor, Tony Buchsbaum, wrote when the book came out in hardcover last June, “The Passage is certainly the best read of the […]
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