Amy Gallup is a crotchety, misanthropic 60-year-old author and writing teacher who would strongly prefer to be left alone. At home. With her basset hound, Alphonse. (Her mantra, in Willett’s prequel, The Writing Class: Kill Me Now).
The novel made up entirely of letters isn’t a new form. But the email novel is a newer development — not that there aren’t already enough examples of them out there to make writing one a potentially slippery slope ending…
It took eight months of waiting, but finally the library copy of The Goldfinch stayed on the shelf long enough for me to get my mitts on it. As it was, I had to jerk it out of my sister’s…
It’s a coincidence that just after re-reading a childhood favorite of mine, Harriet the Spy, I should pick up an adult novel that also features kids spying on adults.
By now, I would have thought that the chance of coming up with a non-cliché male geek misfit character would be very slim. But Gabriel Roth has beaten the odds.
When I learned that the title of novelist Gary Shteyngart’s new memoir was Little Failure, I thought he was doing his usual self-deprecating shtick. When I read that, translated into RussGlish — Failurchka — it was his mother’s pet name…
Yes, I read and liked Eat, Pray, Love like the rest of female America of a certain age. But I also enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert’s earlier fiction, especially Stern Men, set in the world of Maine’s lobster fishing industry.
Anyone who can embroider a letter of complaint into a great tragicomic novel is worth following, in my book. So when I heard that Jonathan Miles (author of Dear American Airlines) had a new one out, my page turning finger…
I’ve missed the last few books by Jonathan Lethem, but remember liking some of his earlier ones, especially Motherless Brooklyn, an unforgettable novel about a detective with Tourette syndrome.