The greatest achievement of a literary novel—or perhaps any book—may be to shake a reader’s core beliefs, to upend what seems natural and true. It’s most shocking when those earth-shattering revelations had barely brushed our consciousness.
Coffee Break Review: Amy Bloom's White Houses
Amy Bloom’s new novel, White Houses, combines a pacey but cozy literary love story of heart-plucking longing balanced by realistic barriers—which hinge on mutable emotions, cultural restrictions, poor timing, bounds of duty—with clever banter and an irresistible peek inside a presidential marriage. At its core, though, White Houses is simply and powerfully an ode to lasting, shifting love.
53 Books to Read in 2018
2018 promises to be a stellar year for readers. We can't wait to get our hands on novels by Michael Ondaatje, Julian Barnes and Amy Bloom. There's a novel set in Tangier that brings to mind the fascinating lives of Paul and Jane Bowles; the true story of a woman's obsession with a serial killer; an Israeli pitted against his Palestinian best friends; posthumous works by Denis Johnson and William Trevor; and essay collections by some of the most astute public intellectuals, including Zadie Smith, Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson.
Our list of 52 titles coming out in the first six months of the year promises hours of provoking, moving, challenging and pleasurable reads. Keep this list handy so you don't get behind!
Year's Best Reads 2017 and a Peek into 2018
If your 2017 was anything like ours, it whizzed by in a dizzy of confused haste. That's one of the reasons our round-up of the best of 2017 is a bit delayed. But the books that crossed our paths in the previous twelve months were too good to ignore. As usual, we asked some of our favorite literary people to tell us what stood out in their reading year, regardless of the book's publication date. We also asked them to give us a peak at what they're looking forward to in 2018.
The Readers (and Musicians) of New Orleans
When a Novel Upends the Historical Record: The Lost Pages
You don’t go to Shakespeare to learn the history of Henry VIII. That’s what Peter Carey once said to explain why facts didn’t bind him when he wrote True History of Kelly Gang in the voice of legendary, infamous bushranger Ned Kelly. It’s not the novelist’s task to give the reader the absolute truth; the goal must be to tell a good story, to discover (or create) hidden aspects of character, to subvert and to use the historical record in a way that serves story.
Writing Naked: Remembering Denis Johnson
I spent much of the past three months preparing for an on-stage interview at the Auckland Writers Festival with Johnson, who died on Wednesday, May 24. He cancelled his appearance several weeks before the festival, but it was a great pleasure—and often an education—to read and reread his books and prepare for the meeting.
What We've Been Reading
We're Still Strolling...
A Show of Hands: A One-Act Play by Michael Martin
Michael Martin, poet and editor, is proving himself an exciting new playwright.
Last year, we shared the first in a cycle of plays, FLOR-ALA. Now we bring to you A Show of Hands, a surprising, funny and provoking work about complacency and threat.
New Work: Paintings by Angie de Latour
Read, Memory, Ecstasy, Read
For what, the narrator of Leonard Michaels's Sylvia asks, has all of his time reading literature prepared him? He describes himself as “an overspecialised man, twenty-seven years old, who smoked cigarettes and could give no better account of himself than to say ‘I love to read.’”
“But why do I read?” asks the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski in A Defense of Ardor. “Do I really need to answer this question?”
A Novel that Taught Us About the Future, If Only We'd Listened
Several years ago, in the middle of a snow-covered Paris winter, I went to the American Library and checked out my first Charles McCarry novel that didn’t feature CIA agent Paul Christopher. During that first read of Lucky Bastard (1998), I thought McCarry had betrayed me. It was outlandish, too absurd to buy into, this novel about a charming politician with no experience who's indebted to Russia and, as McCarry's publisher describes it, is plagued by "a zipper problem."
Years later—in late 2016, to be precise—certain stories in the news started to sound like they had been pulled directly from this novel. After McCarry's novels predicted the 9/11 attacks decades earlier, I shouldn't have doubted his prescience.
The Wit and Wisdom of Alberto Manguel
Reading Mardi Gras: A Year Carnival Skipped New Orleans
Reading Around the World: Sudan
Then there’s that great pleasure of browsing the shelves with no objective. Before long, a title, a name—something foreign and unknown—calls out. Several years ago, for me, the title was Season of Migration to the North. In that moment, I knew I had something. Indeed, I knew I had it, a mysterious and poetic title, as well as the name of the kind of writer I spend much of my browsing time searching for: someone from a region I know little about—in the case of Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), author of Season of Migration to the North, northern Sudan.
Coffee Break Review: Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Rest: Dirty Word or Essential Activity?
Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim is full of examples from the arts and sciences that show a clear connection between time spent away from work and the quality of work ultimately completed. Pang quotes artist after (prolific) artist who works hard and consciously but who also naps, maintains a time-consuming hobby and takes significant breaks while remaining at the top of his or her field.
But rest is a foreign concept to me. Can Rest help me and others who get caught up in doing too much?
Sometimes You Want Your Heart Broken
Richard Yates keeps trying to break my heart. It happens every time I turn the page of one of his books. The truth is that I want him, maybe even need him, to do it. Break my heart. Knock me out of my chair. With Yates, you don’t need to ask. His work fulfills Kafka’s requirement that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
