Fiction Archive |
The Runaway Wife - The first thing Elizabeth Birkelund said, as she walked into the restaurant: “I read your book.” “And I’ve read yours,” I said, and we laughed, and cheek-kissed, and just like that,
The Sense of an Ending - Under 30? Take the day off. Really. The concerns of this book will seem Martian to you. 30-55? This slim book could seem like a preview of coming attractions. But not
The Silent Wife - Hollywood would rather make “Rocky 2” than “Rocky.” Publishers would rather release “Gone Girl 2” than just about anything. You can’t blame them. In 2012 Gone Girl was the Fifty Shades of
The Silver Linings Playbook - This is a little film --- a relationship film: no car chases, no special effects --- about two damaged people who find each other, mess each other up, heal each other. It
The Sleeper - Alfred Hitchcock said the way to make movies that frighten people is to give them a fear bigger than the fears they live with every day. That was pretty much
The Snow Goose - In the spring of 1940, nothing could stop Hitler's march across Europe --- by late May, Paris was on the verge of falling to the Nazis. And the English troops who had fought
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Parents, educators, clinicians --- and some kids --- are less than thrilled with "13 Reasons Why," the Netflix series about a teenage girl who kills herself after being humiliated by
The Space Merchants - As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report. This isn’t the way science
The Stories of John Cheever - Of the many profiles I've written, why is my Cheever piece still so vivid for me? The answer has less to do with the man than with his work. That
The Summer Kitchen - Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in
The Tears of Autumn - So, after 50 years, many of the government's files about the assassination of President Kennedy have been released. Did you learn anything? I didn't. And when more are released, I
The Thief of Always - "I never get scared by books,” said our daughter, when she was 8, “but this is really scaring me.” From a kid who liked suspense, there's no higher praise. What freaked
The Things They Carried - When I went to Costa Rica, I thought to read books set in a hot, wet climate. Because the Costa Rican rain forest is so much like Vietnam, I took along
The Unknown Terrorist - Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize --- the most prestigious literary award in England --- for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Richard Flanagan? Don't fault yourself for
The Vanishing Point: A Novel - There is only one kind of novel I like to read and only one kind I like to recommend to you --- novels I can’t put down, novels that, if
The Weekend Story: “Dear Life” by Alice Munro - Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013. Massive cheering followed, for Munro's stories are deep, intimate and concise --- they're compressed novels. Although she knows so much about her
The Widow Waltz - I know Sally Koslow slightly, and she knows this site a bit better, so she asked me to read and blurb her new novel. I submitted this: “’The Widow Waltz’ is
The Woman in Cabin 10 - GUEST BUTLER NORA LEVINE owns the literary mystery/thriller corner of this site. That’s my good fortune — I can’t read everything — and yours too. Nora introduced us — well,
The Wonder Spot - The first 45 pages of "The Wonder Spot" are pretty much a stone bore. Twelve year-old Sophie Applebaum goes to a Bat Mitzvah in Chappaqua. She has a hard time in
There There - Butler reviewed this book in September, 2019. Six months later, Tommy Orange won the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award for the most distinguished first book of fiction. The judges called "There
