Larry’s Kidney: (Being the Story of) How I Found Myself in China with my Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant—and Save His Life
By Daniel Asa Rose
William Morrow, 305 pp., $25.99
Memoirs are tricky things these days. We’ve been conditioned as readers to Read More
Envy, by Kathryn Harrison. Random House, 301 pages, $24.95. “Can it be true that all of Will’s patients are consumed by the topic of sex? Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under Read More
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. W.W. Norton, 252 pages, $23.95.
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she
was horrid.
I present Read More
Prep , by Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, 406 pages, $21.95.
Yo, prep-school papa! You with the gray hair and rueful smile, dropping your little bundle of neuroses off at her boarding school after the long Christmas break. You think no one was watching? You think no one saw how you jumped on the Read More
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, by Annie Proulx. Scribner, 219 pages, $25.
The secret to Annie Proulx’s latest collection of down-home Wyoming stories is hidden in plain sight: “In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting Read More
Runaway, by Alice Munro. Alfred A. Knopf, 335 pages, $25.
Does anyone know if the word “coquette” was in vogue in Canada in the 1940′s? Because if it was, you can be sure that the gravely gifted and always interesting short-story writer Alice Munro, born in rural Ontario in 1931, didn’t get through Read More
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
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
