The Seas , by Samantha Hunt. MacAdam/Cage, 196 pages, $23.
A new aphorism for the over-30 set: Don’t trust anyone who claims to be objective about experimental fiction. Subjectivity is part and parcel of the experience, and quite gloriously so, it seems to me. I cheerfully admit that a lot of what passes Read More
Heir to the Glimmering World , by Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin, 310 pages, $24.
Confession: It’s not Virginia Woolf I’m afraid of-it’s Cynthia Ozick. Even though she blurbed my last book (disclosure, disclosure) and once recommended me for a fellowship I didn’t get (thanks for the memories, Mr. Guggenheim), still I’m afraid of her. Read More
Vermeer
in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies , by Lawrence Weschler.
Pantheon Books, 432 pages, $25.95.
After a fair amount of discussion with folk on neighboring
treadmills, the word I’ve finally settled upon is “excellentric.” It adds a
dash of excellence to the high art of being eclectic, while connoting the
expertise that Read More
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions , by Richard Ben Cramer. Simon and Schuster, 308 pages, $24.
This really happened: I had been serving as arts and culture editor of the Forward , the nation’s leading Jewish newspaper, for almost two years when the famously leftist editor, author of eloquent and thoughtful editorials, Read More
A Man After His Own Heart , by Charles Siebert. Crown, 288 pages, $23.95.
There’s a rare breed of writer who, through heightened powers of observation and uncanny vocabulary, elevates the dross of current events into song. Not actual song-the sentences scan the same as anyone else’s on the pages of The New York Read More
The Dew Breaker , by Edwidge Danticat. Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $22.
Only a few hours away by luxury jet lies an island paradise of palm trees and warm sand where the air itself feels forgiving. Lovely chocolate-skinned women wear pink nightgowns, jacarandas grow wild and the customary old-fashioned way to say “You’re Read More
Double Vision: A Self-Portrait , by Walter Abish. Alfred A. Knopf, 220 pages, $24.
We’re all impatient for the memoir to evolve-who needs more cross-eyed mirror-gazing?-but don’t expect the first stabs at a less narrowly focused generation of autobiographical writing to be 20-20, or even particularly legible. Case in point is Walter Abish’s Double Read More
My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson-His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous , by Susan Cheever. Simon and Schuster, 306 pages, $24.
He demanded a drink on his deathbed. Yes, in the final days of his long, knotty life, after 36 years of hard-fought sobriety and public battle against the demon rum, the man Read More
There Are Jews in My House , by Lara Vapnyar. Pantheon, 149 pages, $17.95.
Boiled potatoes in the first sentence, a beige oil cloth in the second. Yes, friends, we are in the much-feared terrain of émigré lit-a darkly remembered world where wet shoes stuffed with newspaper never quite manage to dry before they’re put Read More
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible , by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. Free Press, 304 pages, $25.
Quick story: One summer midnight at age 19, I found myself hitching back to Brown from a near-deadly car crash in Truth or Consequences, N.M., when I was picked up by a splinter group of Okie Read More
