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As any parent who has had to reread the same bedtime story for nights on end knows, children crave consistency. And if any event can upend that cozy sense of security, it's moving house. Could anything — short of monsters, bears and the dark — pose a bigger threat to a small child's well-being? full story | pdf
Bonnie Jo Campbell's bio reads like that of a modern-day folk heroine. She hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, traveled with Ringling Brothers, and lead adventure tours in Eastern Europe. Fittingly, in her second novel, Campbell introduces a character as formidable as herself. full story | pdf
Readers of British author Poppy Adams’s gothic first novel will quickly suspect that its narrator, Ginny Stone, is somewhat unhinged. Hardly a page in, the 70-year-old bundle of quirks takes obvious care to point out that she is “levelheaded” and “sensible,” and anyone who has to point this out is usually the opposite. full story | pdf
The main character in Lydia Millet’s inventive but flawed sixth novel is a young, wildly successful real-estate developer named Thomas, or simply T. After a childhood spent collecting money for bogus charities and conning protection money out of an unfortunate classmate, Thomas, the son of an increasingly batty mother and an apparently loveless dad, develops a sophisticated knack for observing human nature that helps him charm vast sums of money out of investors. full story | pdf
What brooding adolescent hasn’t felt imprisoned at one time or another, as though everything around him is utter shit? Unfortunately for Judd Breslau, that bit of hyperbole is literally true: When we meet him, he’s incarcerated in a godforsaken province of Iraq, where each building is constructed from bricks whose primary ingredient is human excrement. full story | pdf
The title story in Jean Thompson’s latest collection, Throw Like a Girl, addresses terminal illness, romantic disillusionment and the cruelties of friendship—and that’s one of the book’s more affirming tales. The author’s female protagonists suffer through failed marriages, unfulfilling affairs and career frustrations; soul-numbing disappointment plagues even her youngest main characters. full story | pdf
In this age of identity theft and blogger mania, people’s personal lives are up for grabs, whether they want them to be or not. At the same time, technology has made it easier to hide behind an assumed persona—that curvaceous grad student you’re e-mailing with might be a recovering glue huffer living in his mom’s basement. Walter Kirn’s new satire, The Unbinding, explores these contradictory but hardly groundbreaking notions in prose that mimics online diaries, surveillance dispatches and recorded conversations. full story | pdf
Stories about the upper strata of society tend to satisfy two base cravings: They offer a dizzying glimpse of the excesses of the fantastically rich, while fueling the delicious schadenfreude of watching members of the privileged class suffer their inevitable comeuppance. full story | pdf | website
With all but one chapter set over the course a single day, Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park can seem as claustrophobic as the eponymous, fictional English suburb in which it’s set. The five central characters, all middle-class mothers of young children, obsess, ruminate and fester with resentment. To hear them tell it—and we do, in intimate narration that shifts perspective from character to character—their husbands are useless, malevolent or both. full story | pdf
How does language influence thought and, by extension, reality? Did God invent man, or was it the other way around? When a novelist dares to ask big questions, as Scarlett Thomas does in her exhilarating new novel The End of Mr. Y, periodic lapses—awkward exposition, cartoonish bad guys—can be forgiven, especially if she couches her inquiry in the guise of a compulsively absorbing thriller. full story | pdf
Most of the 10 stories in Karen Russel's first collection take place in a surreal, exaggerated version of the Florida everglades, where scooped-out crab exoskeletons double as beach sleds, and giant conch shells loom as large as houses. full story | pdf
A missing dame, colorful metaphors, answers that only raise more questions: By the time Tommy Akhtar confesses that he's "the latest in a long line of Marlowe wannabes," more than halfway through Patrick Neate's ambitious twist on the classic hard-boiled detective novel, the admission is superfluous.
Poet, essayist, hallucinatory novelist and short-story writer Kate Braverman has an artistic portfolio as varied as the diverse life she has led: teen runaway and single mom, Berkeley radical and literary mentor, feminist outlaw and university wife.
Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519; two years later, history tells us, the Aztec civilization fell to the Spanish invaders and was wiped out. "Atomik Aztex," the hallucinatory first novel by poet Sesshu Foster, proposes a different reality.
Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book" relates the adventures of Mowgli, a boy reared by wolves in the wilds of India. Just as Kipling's man-cub found succor with an improbable mother, so too were the seeds of his tale sown in unlikely ground: the rocky hills of rural Vermont.
Its chirpy title may seem to place it squarely in the middle of the self-help shelf, but "You Grow Girl: The Groundbreaking Guide to Gardening" (Fireside, $15) is chock-full of sensible advice for budding as well as mature bloom tenders (and just in time for Earth Day, no less).
Berry Sanchez, the titular hero of Charlie Anders' first novel, "Choir Boy," is a socially awkward 13-year-old whose sole refuge from middle-school humiliations and parental bickering is singing in church. He finds salvation not in the word of God but in the music of his worshipers, in the purity of voices lifting in song.
Don't let the title fool you: There's more to the Thailand of "Sightseeing," Rattawut Lapcharoensap's first story collection, than just the gilt-edged, sun-dappled Land of Smiles found in tourism brochures.
The violent death of her sister Marion summons expatriate Kate Kempden home from 1970s Paris to South Africa in Sheila Kohler's darkly compelling new novel, "Crossways." full story | pdf
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