Minot's new novella, set on the fringes of the film world, addresses one of her perennial themes, the different meaning men and women give to passion. Thirty-four-year-old Kay Bailey, a film Continue reading »
When an acclaimed novelist suddenly switch-hits with a book of verse and publishes it as part of a high-profile poetry list, some regular readers of poetry fear the worst: that the book will be Continue reading »
Here it is always women who love too much and self-sufficient men who act like heels. ``After Minot's promising debut with Monkeys , the short stories in this slender collection are disappointingly Continue reading »
A dying woman's abiding passion for a lover she met in her 20s propels this eloquent third novel by the gifted author of Monkeys and Folly. As 65-year-old cancer patient Ann Grant Lord drifts in and Continue reading »
After Minot's promising debut with Monkeys , the short stories in this slender collection are disappointingly one-dimensional. In their unrevelatory and quickly monotonous exploration of the limited Continue reading »
Minot earned high praise for her first novel, Monkeys . Here she again displays a brilliant gift for loading frugal prose with emotion and innuendo. Folly penetrates a staid upper-class scene in the Continue reading »
In 1996, 30 adolescent girls were taken from their school in Uganda and kept captive by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a ragtag rebel movement led by the notorious warlord Joseph Kony. Minot (Evening) Continue reading »
An overweight, complacent American woman on a 1986 visit to Beijing becomes fascinated with China and energetically embraces a new life in this affecting tale. Continue reading »
A wisecracking Berkeley graduate evades gangsters and police while a journalist investigates a topless dancer's death in this grand tour of Tulsa's extensive seamy side. ``Berkey's only bad habit is Continue reading »
Two decades after his promising '60s debut, Gold makes a welcome return, distilling his own bout with alcoholism into the story of Jason Sams, failed writer and hopeless drunk. Continue reading »
Quiet and content April Epner, a high school Latin teacher whose adoptive parents are recently deceased, is claimed by her birth mother, an obnoxious TV talk show hostess. ``Raising laughter and Continue reading »
In an enchanting second novel--a BOMC selection in cloth--Lipman traces the untriumphant return of 30-year-old Melinda LeBlanc to her recently gentrified Massachusetts hometown after a decade of Continue reading »
Charts international cover girl Gia Carangi's descent from $10,000-a-day modeling jobs to heroin addiction and death from AIDS at age 26. Photos. Continue reading »
This charming first novel portrays the romantic mishaps that attend a shy Indian graduate student's attempts to adjust to life in Berkeley, Calif. Continue reading »
The author of Kitchen, portrays a dead Japanese writer's story collection and a mysterious curse that dooms those who attempt to translate the last one. Continue reading »
This is a story of love between Zora, an independent, aspiring singer, and Franklin, a sometimes-employed carpenter. Life has been unkind to these star-crossed lovers, but they're both survivors. Continue reading »
Anton, the Dove Fancier: And Other Tales of the Holocaust
Bernard Gotfryd
Hours before she was deported to the concentration camp where she was murdered, the author's mother begged him to survive ``to tell the world what the Nazis did to us.'' With his simple, affecting Continue reading »
Dr. Jeremy Cook becomes the prime suspect in a double murder at the linguistic development institute where he works in Double Negative , a debut novel PW called ``a first-rate thriller.'' Cook Continue reading »
This novel of Northern Ireland and an American courier jeopardized by his IRA sympathies is paced like a thriller and conveyed through gritty dialogue and detail. Continue reading »
In 11 supple short stories, Lesser writes about now-generation young women who plug along at literary/journalistic or arty jobs while hovering on the margins of other people's lives. ``The Continue reading »
Fifty years in the lives of two families--one Russian-Welsh, another Jewish--are traced from WW I to the founding of Israel. PW described this as ``a novel that is for the most part breathlessly Continue reading »
The chaotic experience of Cubans transplanted to New York City throbs through the narrator's voice in this debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . Continue reading »
Anna, an oft-married hairdresser residing in Texas, plans ownership of a beauty shop while being wooed by a widower and his daughter. ``With authentic, if garrulous, dialogue, the unconventional love Continue reading »
These short stories evoke the quiet yet frequently desperate lives of seemingly conventional Americans. ``Lott writes cleanly, precisely and with imagination. Yet most of these tales are dismayingly Continue reading »
``Inn Essence,'' the tale of a young American salad chef among a group of Thai waiters, is the highlight of this collection; other standouts include ``Purification,'' in which a fishing trip becomes Continue reading »
North Carolina's Ocracoke Island is the setting of this intriguing and poetic novel focusing on Emily, who leaves her longtime lover for a newcomer to the community, and on her 16-year-old son, Continue reading »
After opening on the 1969 funeral of a woman who fell or leaped from a rooftop, this narrative shifts to the 1950s; through her three daughters, we learn that she is an alcoholic who once dropped or Continue reading »
Once Upon a Time on the Banks: Once Upon a Time on the Banks
Cathie Pelletier
Boisterous, tacky and opportunistic residents of Mattagash, Maine, prepare for the unlikely wedding of Amy Jo Lawler, descendant of their small town's Protestant founder, to a Catholic with Continue reading »
Siblings Teddy and Cora--who grew up in a squabbling, peripatetic Army major's family--learn that their elusive, recently widowed father has married an Asian woman with whom he has been involved Continue reading »
Carl Holtzclaw and his brother, a failed boxer, botch the kidnapping of a rich college student when a local gangster tries to collect on one of Carl's bad gambling debts. According to PW , scenes of Continue reading »
In this unforgettable work, Israeli writer Grossman sets a critical juncture in his four narrators' lives against the moral and ethical corrosion of the Israeli occupation. Continue reading »
Jewel Hilburn, the strong-willed narrator of this haunting novel set in rural Mississippi, lavishes the parental love she never received upon her own child, who is afflicted with Down's syndrome. Continue reading »
A gifted storyteller and a fine writer, Houston brings insight and an original perspective to the heavily trafficked gender divide in her short-story collection, which was a two-week PW bestseller in Continue reading »
In top comedic form, Malone follows a North Carolina English professor's merry chase across the Atlantic after a play of his that has been purloined. Continue reading »
Heavy-handed symbolism and plenty of repetition ensure that even the least attentive reader will grasp the twin themes of mourning and renewal in Lott's latest effort. Three months after their young Continue reading »
When her live-in lover of 12 years tells her he's marrying someone else, Harriet Mahoney, a writer of unpublished stories ``about love between quiet people'' answers an ad for a ghostwriter. She Continue reading »
Willis Jane Digby, letters editor of a feminist magazine called Sisterhood , can't resist answering her most bizarre correspondents, among them a mental patient, a pervert and ``The Watcher,'' who Continue reading »
The Daisy Chain: How Borrowed Billions Sank a Texas Sandl
James O'Shea
The extent of the S & L disaster--now estimated at $500 billion--continues to grow in impact as the press discloses fresh examples of greed, fraud and incompetence involving accounts, appraisers, Continue reading »
Munson's outstanding debut novel presents John Haack, an intelligent, attractive man who leads a double life as Jaguar, a sadistic killer who decapitates his victims. This criminal is especially Continue reading »
Four affluent former '60s radicals are called upon to rescue an ex-cohort from a Mexican jail; a hard-drinking diver for an illegal scavenging firm dredges an Indian's body from Lake Superior; a Continue reading »
O'Shea focuses on entrepreneur Donald Dixon, who purchased a federally insured Vernon, Tex., S & L and used it to fund his reckless ventures and lavish lifestyle. PW called this ``an astute appraisal Continue reading »
In a second novel as enchanting as her first, Lipman ( Then She Found Me ) traces the untriumphant return of 30-year-old Melinda LeBlanc to her recently gentrified hometown of Harrow, Mass., after a Continue reading »
Munson's outstanding debut novel--Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates in cloth--presents John Haack, an intelligent, attractive man who leads a double life as a sadistic killer. Continue reading »
Klavan, an Edgar winner who also writes as Keith Peterson, expertly interweaves the disparate worlds of a psychiatrist who takes on the hard cases: catatonics, schizophrenics and the criminally Continue reading »
In this collection of entertaining and enlightening essays--BOMC and QPB alternates selection in cloth--Lederer celebrates language as ``incomparably the finest of our achievements.'' Continue reading »
Delightful and insightful, this collection explores the many varietes of love letters. Divided into six parts--from ``Falling in Love'' to ``Absence'' to ``The End of Love''--as well as several Continue reading »
In his fifth novel, Walker ( A Dime to Dance By ) relates a sprightly and cynical tale of pro basketball and corruption. The book focuses on the fictional San Francisco Golden Gaters, a Continue reading »
Ward, best known for Cattle Annie and Little Britches but most admired for the somber proletarian novel Red Baker , has worked in Hollywood for years; as with Richard Price, scriptwriting seems not Continue reading »
Maneuvering the plot of his latest urban thriller with the irresistible skill of a three-card monte expert, Klavan leaves his mesmerized readers the winners. In New York City on Halloween morning, Continue reading »
``Gia'' Marie Carang (1960-1986) hit the fashion world like a storm in the late 1970s, after she was discovered by model agent Wilhelmina Cooper; soon she was pictured on the covers of Vogue and Continue reading »
Walker's amusing but somewhat convoluted tale of pro basketball and corruption centers on a fictional, struggling basketball franchise and a murdered sports columnist. Continue reading »
Perhaps destined to become this season's The Bridges of Madison County , this sentimental romance novel by the author of To Dance with the White Dog pulls on the heartstrings as it tells a Continue reading »
Watson's novel about a middle-class Montana family torn apart by scandal during the summer of 1948 was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. Continue reading »
Windham-Campbell winner Alexis (Fifteen Dogs) dazzles with these stark and enchanting stories, many of which feature Trinidadian immigrants in small-town Ontario. In Continue reading »
This effervescent 1985 novel from Swiss author Werner (On the Edge), who died in 2016, follows a ruined middle-aged man haunted by the ghost of his father. Franz, a divorced Continue reading »
Poet Vuong follows up his acclaimed first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with a searching and beautiful story of a troubled young man. “The hardest thing in the world Continue reading »
Bausch (Playhouse) delivers a wondrous collection of stories about the tempestuous lives of ordinary people. The narrator of “In That Time” reminisces about his trip to Cuba in Continue reading »