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America America by Ethan Canin
 It's refreshing -- and almost quaint -- to see someone try to write a Great American Novel in the 21st century. These days, writers are more apt to pursue the Great American Screenplay or the Not-So-Great American Ironic, Postmodern Fiction. But Ethan Canin's sixth book, with its flag-waving title, ...
Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron
 In the months before he fell into his final, fatal illness in the fall of 2006, William Styron compiled a number of essays, lectures and occasional pieces that he had written over the previous 20 years of his life. Havanas in Camelot is the result of that foraging process, and while it's a minor...
Draining the Sea by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
 It's unsurprising that Micheline Aharonian Marcom, whose first two novels, Three Apples Fell From Heaven and The Daydreaming Boy, explore the massacre of Armenians nearly a century ago, has turned her attention to Guatemala.
She is among a growing number of contemporary novelists writing about...
The Soul Thief: A Novel by Charles Baxter
 In 2000, after years of critical acclaim and anemic sales, Charles Baxter finally hit the big time with The Feast of Love. The book sold more than 200,000 copies, and a film version -- featuring Morgan Freeman's rumbling baritone and a veritable parade of topless actresses -- was released last fall....
The Appeal: A Novel by John Grisham
 John Grisham sometimes seems less a literary personality than a force of nature -- his books a showy kind of regularly reoccurring natural phenomenon, a sort of Halley's comet between hard covers.
People who keep track of such things report that Grisham was the bestselling author of the 1990s...
Yalo by Elias Khoury
 Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to...
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
 He was never waiting for the barbarians. Even in the novel bearing that name, published in Great Britain in 1980, the South African writer and now Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee situated them in our midst. They were not the proclaimed threat on the periphery of the unnamed Empire of his allegory, but...
A View of the Ocean by Jan De Hartog
 Jan de Hartog's A View of the Ocean is very much in keeping with a sub-tradition in modern European literature: the small, spare memoir of a parent's death. In that sense, it's reminiscent of Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, or Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death.
...
Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson
 At a ceremony in New York last Wednesday night, just four days after the death of Norman Mailer, Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel, Tree of Smoke, a sprawling, Mailer-esque phantasmagoria about the war in Vietnam. Although these two events have nothing to do with...
Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy
 Benjamin Percy proved he is a remarkable storyteller with his first collection, The Language of Elk. He breaks new ground with Refresh, Refresh, which includes half a dozen short stories that are among the first to measure the human repercussions in the ongoing narrative of the Iraq war.
Since...
Fire in the Blood: A Novel
by Irene Nemirovsky
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