The Summer Guest , by Justin Cronin. The Dial Press, 369 pages, $24.
The Summer Guest is a melodrama, and I mean that in the most neutral, definitional sense. This second novel by Justin Cronin (his first, Mary and O’Neil , won the 2002 P.E.N./Hemingway Award) teems with big events-birth, death, illness, a harrowing Read More
Mortals , by Norman Rush. Alfred A. Knopf, 715 pages, $26.95.
To call Ray Finch, the protagonist of Mortals, “uxorious” is to understate the case. Here’s a guy who comes home from work to his wife of many years and muses: “It never changed for him, seeing her again after a day’s separation, or even Read More
The Little Friend , by Donna Tartt. Alfred A. Knopf, 555 pages, $26.
Like two other youngish authors, JeffreyEugenidesandJonathan Franzen, who recently tossedmassivevolumes onto the literary playing field after remaining largely silent since the early 90′s, Donna Tartt has her own big cleats to fill. The Secret History , published in 1992, was an international Read More
The Art of Travel , by Alain de Botton. Pantheon, 256 pages, $23.
In the last chapter of The Art of Travel , Alain de Botton invokes two late-18th-century works by the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre: Journey Around My Bedroom and Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom . As the titles suggest, these volumes chronicle, Read More
It’s become a familiar lament: Globalization is wreaking enormous cultural loss. Alexander Stille’s illuminating and engrossing new book, The Future of the Past , manages to drain the phrase cultural loss of its easy melancholy and explore instead what it actually means . In chapters set in an array of locales India, Egypt, Madagascar, Somalia, Read More
Inner Navigation: Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way , by Erik Jonsson. Scribner, 347 pages, $25.
Erik Jonsson’s Inner Navigation achieves within its first few pages something that few books manage to do at all: It isolates a subtle but universal strand of human experience-physical disorientation-and holds it up to scrutiny. Read More
New York Exposed: Photographs from the Daily News , by Shawn O’Sullivan. Harry N. Abrams, 319 pages, $39.95.
What meaning clings to a collection of images of New York-320 photographs from the Daily News -all taken between 1920 and New Year’s Eve, 2000? I put off looking at it, suspecting that the stories it had Read More
