|
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Alice Munro Explores the Rooms of Our Lives
A review by Ellen Urbani
The advent of a much-heralded literary comeback is upon us; week after week, in a nearly endless parade of mastery, new work is being trotted out but such luminaries as Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Lorrie Moore, Thomas Pynchon and even Vladimir Nabokov. Even so, Alice Munro's 13th story collection, Too Much Happiness, will surely be one of the most venerated and widely reviewed of the bunch. Debuting mere months after her virtual coronation with the Man Booker International Prize for her body of work, and sidling out from beneath the long shadow cast by her...
The Good Soldiers by Finkel David
Across the Great Divide
A review by Akiva Gottlieb
In Washington, they read. Foreign policy decisions made by men and women in suits, understandably too busy to embark on a fact-finding mission to every war zone, disaster area or human rights debacle, often depend on the labor of reporters (who report) and experts (who filter raw eyewitness accounts into something historically and politically resonant, primed for the partisan echo chambers). In October, in the thick of the Beltway debate over the best course of action in Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal observed that White House and Pentagon policy-makers were studying two histories that...
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran by Haleh Esfandiari
Locked Up
A review by Nikki Keddie
Esfandiari's profoundly moving memoir goes beyond the limited story suggested in its subtitle to interweave a vivid autobiography and a brief history of Iran before and after the 1978-79 revolution. Potential readers should not be put off by fear of a depressing tale of horror; this is, above all, a story of faith -- in the human capacity to withstand mistreatment and in what people working together against tyranny can accomplish. Born to a prominent Iranian agronomist and his Austrian wife, Esfandiari grew up in relative privilege. She attended college in Vienna and took a job at a...
|
Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka
Made Man
A review by Mark Athitakis
Who made Raymond Carver? Maybe it was Gordon Lish, who edited Carver's short stories about workaday lives into the minimalist style that made him famous. Perhaps it was editor Gary Fisketjon, whose marketing savvy made Carver a standard-bearer of American fiction in the 1980s. Or it could have been his second wife, Tess Gallagher, who bolstered Carver's reputation in the years before his death in 1988. So many people have had a claim on Carver's good name that it's fair to wonder how much of it Carver could claim for himself. Carol Sklenicka's meticulously researched, sharply analytical...
Far Arden by Kevin Cannon
Ships Ahoy
A review by John Eisler
An adventure story a la Tintin meets 21st-century indie comics in Kevin Cannon's debut graphic novel, Far Arden. The book details the quest of an arctic sailor named Army Shanks who, as he tells his young orphan friend at the end of Chapter I, is "going to avenge your father's death, find the Areopagitica, save Hafley, possibly rekindle a rocky love affair with Fortuna (but probably not)... and fulfill my promise to find Far Arden and meet up with my friend and mentor, Simon Arctavius." With a ship named after Milton's famed anti-censorship essay, another named the Melville, and through-lines ...
The Humbling by Philip Roth
Why Can't All Writers Be This Good?
A review by Rhian Ellis
There are a handful of writers I read not because of the stories they tell, or for their memorable characters, or for their ability to evoke a time or place, but because I really enjoy being inside their heads. Alice Munro is one of these writers--her characters are vividly real but not especially distinctive, and if you read a lot of her work, they all blur together. Things happen in her stories, but the plots feel secondary to how the narrator interprets them. And to be honest, if I had to choose a time and place to read about, rural 20th century Canada would not spring to mind. But I...
|
Don't Miss
