By Ann Beattie
Scribner, $10.00, 102 pages
Ann Beattie’s Walks with Men rides a fine line between deadpan minimalism and postmodern entropy. Her characters have always seemed to drift around in a haze of summer humidity and pot smoke, late bloomer hippies coming of age during the Carter administration who wouldn’t be out of place in a [...]
By Brunonia Barry
William Morrow, $25.99, 394 pages
Zee Finch is the star of this story and we meet her in her adulthood working as a respected psychotherapist in Boston. We understand that she worked hard to obtain this professional position, and also to win the heart of Boston’s most eligible bachelor. But we know immediately that [...]
By Demas, Corinne
Voice, $23.99, 296 pages
The Writing Circle by Corinne Demas takes readers into the fictional Leopardi Circle, a group of six writers who come together to share their work. Nancy Markopolis is invited to join the group, which meets weekly to share and critique each other’s work. Nancy finds a lot more than she [...]
By Sara Gruen
Spiegel & Grau, $26.00, 306 pages
“They’ve become more human, and I’ve become more bonobo.”
Sara Gruen’s new novel Ape House will be certain to please fans of her wildly popular 2007 novel Water for Elephants. Human-animal relationships and the dangers of animal exploitation are again Gruen’s focus, but here she explores the fascinating world [...]
By Blossom Kan, Michelle Yu
Thomas Dunne Books, $24.99, 252 pages
Sarah Cho has always wanted to be an actress, but the rigors of life in New York City have always meant few opportunities to break into the business, and a subsequent need to work multiple menial jobs just to make ends meet. But then Sarah meets [...]
By Nora McFarland
Touchstone, $14.99, 288 pages
Lilly Hawkins is having the worst day ever. After a string of bad luck, this TV news “shooter” finally has the scoop she needs to get her career back on track: exclusive footage of a murder crime scene. But when she brings the tape back to the studio, it’s completely [...]
By James King
Viking, $24.95, 304 pages
Bill Warrington’s family has become distant. His daughter is the only one he ever sees, and she never has anything nice to say. His two sons are facing problems of their own, and have long since cut off communications with their dad. So when Bill realizes he has Alzheimer’s, he [...]
By Pouncey, Maggie
Pantheon, $24.95, 275 pages
Twenty-something Flora Dempsey returns home after the death of her father, ex-president and retired English professor of Darwin College. She has inherited not only his house and his dog Larks (named after the poet, Philip Larkin) but been named his literary executor. She is unprepared for and loath to tackle [...]
By Brady Udall
Norton, $26.95, 599 pages
The Lonely Polygamist is the latest offering from Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. The main character is Golden Richards, a Mormon with four wives and twenty-eight children. With that kind of domestic arrangement, how ironic it is that Richards still struggles with things like infatuation [...]
By Alix Strauss
Harper Paperbacks, $13.99, 340 pages
If the idea of reading about the fictional lives of eight highly dysfunctional and miserable women makes you giddy with excitement, you might like Based Upon Availability. This novel by Alix Strauss permits one to wallow in misery. The chief protagonist, Morgan, the manager at the Four Seasons Hotel [...]
By Steve Stern
Algonquin Books, $24.95, 370 pages
Most tales involving enlightenment are dead serious. The Frozen Rabbi is not one of them.
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr is frozen in a lake as his soul goes exploring, trapping him in a block of ice for the next 150 years. When he finally unfreezes in the modern era, he [...]
By Jaspreet Singh
Walker & Company, $14.00, 250 pages
“The carrots and onions were having better sex than me. Zucchini made scandalous love to paneer, mushrooms, garlic and tomatoes.”
Award-winning short story writer Jaspreet Singh’s first novel opens fittingly on a train as the narrator, Kirpal Singh, is traveling from India to Kashmir. Though ill, he is [...]
By Allegra Goodman
Dial Press, $25.00, 394 pages
Yearnings of love and kinship pepper The Cookbook Collector, as techno-geeks and ecology warriors try to harness their clashing sentiments. Often, the insights and dissection of morals and different views of life do grab attention. But not often enough.
“You go out there on weekends, confronting angry loggers and risk [...]
By Orringer, Julie
Knopf, $26.95, 602 pages
If it is an author’s highest goal to fully absorb her reader into the novel, then Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge stands as a marvel. When her characters joyed, I smiled. When they faced terror, my mouth went dry and my breath grew short. As they suffered, I found myself [...]
By Pearl Abraham
Random House, $25.00, 258 pages
This is an evocative and very disturbing journey through the evolution of a brilliant but unbalanced mind. To a religious skeptic, the only point of view from which I can approach this work, the essential vulnerability of the protagonist is a gaping hole in his existential grasp of the [...]
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