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Francine Prose

The Summer Doldrums

It’s more than the weather, the August doldrums: A dark mood seems to have descended on the city. You can actually see a sort of robotic anomie on the faces of people on the streets and in the subways, where New Yorkers have learned to take the psychic temperature of their neighbors. A guy in Read More

Satirist’s Keen Talent Targets Motherhood Gone Badly Wrong

About a year ago, in a diner on eastern Long Island, I experienced one of those moments—to which writers seem especially prone—of rapt, unseemly over-interest in the people at the next table. Beautifully dressed for leisure, sleek and thin as whippets, the young, medicated-seeming mother and her slightly older husband were the sort of parents Read More

Satirist’s Keen Talent Targets Motherhood Gone Badly Wrong

About a year ago, in a diner on eastern Long Island, I experienced one of those moments—to which writers seem especially prone—of rapt, unseemly over-interest in the people at the next table. Beautifully dressed for leisure, sleek and thin as whippets, the young, medicated-seeming mother and her slightly older husband were the sort of parents Read More

Model, Teen and Terrorist Face a Culture of Appearances

Look at Me , by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 415 pages, $24.95

Given the sorry state of so much current fiction, the appearance of a novel with a narrative style that seems fresh, accurate, clear and inventive-especially when combined with a gift for observation and the delineation of character-is truly an occasion for calling Read More

Poet, Pilgrim and Memoirist, She Navigates Through Gotham

The Virgin of Bennington , by Kathleen Norris. Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $24.95.

Plenty of bizarre conversations took place in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, but probably few more unlikely–or more touching–than the scene Kathleen Norris describes in her new memoir, The Virgin of Bennington . A hundred or so pages into this Read More

How a Family Empire Went to Hell in a Handbag

The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed , by Sara Gay Forden. William Morrow, 351 pages, $26.

The Gucci family, as everyone knows, accomplished something far more magical than turning the proverbial sow’s ear into the proverbial silk purse. They transformed the sow’s ear–or presumably some more tender part Read More

The Talent Behind Showgirls Gets Intimate With Clinton

American Rhapsody , by Joe Eszterhas. Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages, $25.95.

It’s a familiar scenario: You’re trying to watch a film, but all you keep hearing in your head is the pitch that got the movie made. Well, it’s sort of like Titanic crossed with Thelma and Louise , these two chicks hijack an Read More