PERSONAL DAYS
By Ed Park
Random House, 241 pages, $13
I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they’d implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got Read More
THE WORDS OF EVERY SONG
By Liz Moore
Broadway, 320 pages, $12.95
The Words of Every Song comprises 14 linked, coincidence-laden stories about people in and around New York’s pop-music world—almost half of them female, for once—by a 2005 Barnard graduate whose lizmooremusic.com invites the visitor to stream 12 of her literate folk-rock Read More
Paula Spencer has already been out a while in Britain, where Roddy Doyle is a bigger deal than in America, and I’ve been reading the reviews. I got interested because the first one I saw cleverly quoted a phrase from the novel and called it “sentimental shite.” This irked me. In my view, Mr. Doyle Read More
