Fiction Archive |
Patricia Highsmith & Michael Jackson: How the Dark Lady of American Letters Met the Self-Styled King of Pop - It is early December, 1984, just two years after "Thriller," the twin towers of Michael Jackson's revolutionary music video and album, shot to the top of the charts. Patricia Highsmith,
Patricia Highsmith: The Price of Salt - "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" is a French movie set in the 19th century. It tells a recognition story: two women --- one a painter, one about to be
Paula Fox: Desperate Characters - Jonathan Franzen has just published a novel, Crossroads, and “everybody” is either writing about it or chatting with him. Elle had some questions. What Franzen most wanted to talk about
Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist - SUPPORTING BUTLER: Since the start of 2023, Amazon seems to have gone on a quiet campaign to rid itself of small sites that, collectively, generate revenue worth noticing — and
Personal Days - Lizzie, Jonah, Pru, Crease, Lars, Jill, Jenny and Jack II work in a Manhattan office that is the eastern outpost of an Omaha-owned company. Once this place was
Peter Handke: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - "Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school
Peter Temple - Peter Temple died in 2018. His death was a loss to readers who like novels that seem to be about crime but are really about much more. And it was
Peter Temple: Identity Theory - Johannesburg, 2 PM on a weekday. Here is Niemand, no first name. He's working out. Inside. "Outdoors had become trouble, like being attacked by three men, one with a nail-studded
Peter Temple: The Broken Shore - Peter Temple is two of the best writers I know. He's the best novelist writing about crime in Australia and one of the best crime writers on the planet. And then he’s
Peter Temple: Truth - Laurie doesn’t see him, so Steve Villani is able to study his wife as she walks toward him. Jeans, black leather jacket, thinner, different haircut, a more confident stride. He hasn’t planned
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus - Forget that "Goodbye, Columbus" won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction ... just read the beginning of the novella. The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to
Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer - The first paragraph of "The Ghost Writer," published in 1979, strikes me as close to perfection: It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago
Philip Roth: The Humbling - I read the new Philip Roth novel the other day --- it’s just 140 pages, with fewer words than usual per page, so you can knock it off in a
Philip Roth: The Plot Against America - GUEST BUTLER BARBARA FINKELSTEIN is the author of Summer Long-a-coming. Her pieces for Head Butler include In Defense of Long Books, The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Battle Hymn of the
Picture in the Sand: A Novel - Peter Blauner was a junior person when we both worked at New York Magazine in the 1980s. I didn’t know him. And I didn’t know him when his novel, “Slow
Please Look After Mom - GUEST BUTLER JILL SWITZER has been a member of the State Bar of California for 40 years and now is a full-time mediator. She writes a weekly column called
Primates of Park Avenue - UPDATE: When I interviewed Wednesday Martin and enthusiastically recommended her book, I was under the impression that this Yale Ph.D. had written a closely reported memoir. Since its publication, questions
Rachel Cusk: Outline: A Novel - It took me weeks to read “Outline,” which is odd, because it’s only 247 pages. I carried it everywhere, and people I saw more than once during that time commented
Reunion - Claire Keegan’s exceptional novel, Small Things Like These, ends abruptly on page 128. Her other novel, Foster, says all it needs to in 96 pages. And now I come to
Right of Thirst - Video Meet Frank Huyler I read the publishers' catalogues and sometimes even their novels, and I have the same reaction over and over: Who are these books for? They surely don't touch
