Fiction Archive

Kazuo Ishiguro: “An Artist of the Floating World” - 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

Kurt Vonnegut: “Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.” - On May Day, 1970, Kurt Vonnegut --- the suddenly famous author of “Slaughterhouse-Five” --- drove from his home on Cape Cod to a hippie farm near Brattleboro, Vermont. There was

Lamentations of the Father - How does a man become a murderer? Not the kind of question you and I ask ourselves, but Ian Frazier has thought deeply. Done the homework. And, in He, The Murderer, he

Laurie Colwin - On October 23, 1992, with her daughter tucked in and her husband next to her, Laurie Colwin went to sleep. She did not wake up. She was 48 years old.

Leaving Berlin - American media loves horse races, which is a good reason to avoid watching political pundits on cable TV. Book reviewers have resisted this reductionist way of considering writers, but in

Leeway Cottage - Too many books, too little time. I've been wading through piles of fiction. It's grim work --- most fiction, or at least the books that come my way, are really

Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich - The most frequent request in my mail this winter has been for the link to a video. Specifically, for the first 3 minutes of that video, which appears in my

Leonard Cohen: The Favorite Game - In some homes, Leonard Cohen's birthday is like the birthday of a saint, mostly for the music --- click here for an appreciation and a primer. But Cohen didn't set

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel - “Lessons in Chemistry” has been on the Times fiction bestseller list for 38 weeks, at #1 for many of them. It was Barnes & Noble’s 2022 book of the year

Lillian on Life - The most enjoyable novel I’ve read this year begins like this: “Whenever I wake up next to a man, before I’m fully awake, I think it’s Ted. Of course it

Love & Money - The Governor of South Carolina --- a married father of four who wasn’t shy about proclaiming his Christian faith and family values --- went AWOL to visit his mistress in

Love in Mid Air - Elyse Bearden is flying back from a pottery show in Phoenix when fate seats her next to Gerry Kincaid. He’s an investment banker who climbs mountains on weekends. He’s married

Lush Life - So, it's 4 AM when Eric Cash gets held up at gunpoint. Pitch black. No headlights illuminating the street. Not shadows, even. A shot is fired. Eric's

Maria Semple: Today Will Be Different - Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I’m speaking to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game

Married Sex: A Love Story - THE AMAZING, UNEXPECTED REVIEW IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW It begins: “Kornbluth’s debut novel, about a happy marriage interrupted by a ménage à trois, could easily have coasted on

Married Sex: Interim Report #1 - “Married Sex” has been, as they used to say, “years in the making,” and now, on August 25, it will finally be published. My marketing plan for it is simple:

Matrimony - It's hard to imagine a more radical book --- a traditional novel. Characters you care about, even when they make dumb mistakes. Dialogue that sounds like people could actually say it. A plot

Meg Wolitzer: The Female Persuasion - The problem with “the book of the moment” is that a moment lasts only 30 seconds --- and then the next “book of the moment” comes along, and the next

Men Die - I was 14 when “Men Die” fell into my hands. The basic plot was so simple even a kid could follow it --- a Navy ammunition dump blows up,

Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town