Fiction Archive |
These Days Are Ours - Michelle Haimoff died on June 24, 2019, of liver cancer, in Los Angeles. She was 40. She left behind her husband and two sons. And this book, which I loved.
THIS COULD HURT - Ursula Le Guin had contempt for most modern novels, which she described as “fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense.” Me too. Every week I get
This One Is Mine - Novels set in Los Angeles are tricky. If they're about rich, powerful people, they're generally laced with irony, as if to pay homage to Joan Didion, Nathaniel West,
Thomas Mann - "Buddenbrooks" fills 736 pages. "The Magic Mountain" only takes 720. "Doctor Faustus" is brisk at 544 pages. But I didn't want to face the Lord of Literature at the Library
Those We Love Most - After Peter Jennings stepped down in 2005, Bob Woodruff became the co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight. A month later, he went to Iraq to report on the positive news
Three Minutes on Love - You write a book about rock music, you’ve got a problem. The ending. Does the rocker burn out? Kill someone? Die? Those are pretty much the available choices. There are, of course, rockers
Tim O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods - At 37, John Wade was Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota. At 40, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was heavily favored to win. At 41, he wasn't just
Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried - 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
Tinkers - The winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Olive Kitteridge. I haven’t read it. Ditto the 2008 winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. I did read the
To Kill a Mockingbird - I never thought I'd see the day when the lawyer who argued Brown v. Topeka Board of Education before the Supreme Court and went on to be the first African-American
To My Dearest Friends - On the surface, “To My Dearest Friends” is nothing more than a breezy, chatty, 187-pager about three privileged Manhattan women. One is recently dead. One is the 62-year-old
Tomb of the Unknown Racist: A Novel - I had the pleasure of reading “Tomb of the Unknown Racist” in manuscript, but I really knew nothing about Blanche McCrary Boyd. I hadn’t read any of her other novels;
Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019) - When our daughter was in the ninth grade, her English class read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” It’s a novel and then some, packed with drama and ideas.
Tracy Flick Can’t Win: A Novel - Tom Perotta, a freshly minted graduate of a creative writing graduate program, had an idea for a novel: “a tight-knit working-class family wins the lottery and proceeds to fall apart.”
Tramps Like Us: Bruce Springsteen’s“Born to Run” and Howard Massey’s “Roadie” - “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative
Trouble - Her fourth novel won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award, just in case you are, on the basis of Trouble, not inclined to take Kate Christensen seriously. What would tamper your enthusiasm
Trust - I prefer to read short novels. I write short novels. “Trust” is 402 pages. I read it twice. The first time, because it’s just so well written, I couldn’t put it
Turning Tables - One of my friends once had every job imaginable in a three-star restaurant. On the side, she worked parties for the mega-rich. Now she's married and socializes with
Twenty Thirty: The Real Story of What Happens to America - When last we left Albert Brooks, we thought we had a pretty good idea of his range. He wrote and directed and starred in his own movies. He had plum roles
Two If by Sea - In 1996, I co-founded the book site on AOL that is now Bookreporter.com. In 1996, Jacquelyn Mitchard published her first novel, “The Deep End of the Ocean.” Oprah
