Colm Toibin’s book, “Brooklyn,” is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s when a young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself. Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and sister in small-town Ireland, is an aspiring bookkeeper who cannot find a job in
Read More →“Don’t Suck, Don’t Die” is a beautiful, haunting elegy to a lost friend and fellow musician. Kristen Hersh, frontrunner for the alternative rock band The Throwing Muses and author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Rat Girl,” delivers a stunning, moving portrait of her time with indie singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt. Relegated
Read More →Ruth Reichl has worked as a chef, a food writer, restaurant critic, cookbook writer, editor of Gourmet magazine and author of bestselling memoirs. “Delicious!” is her first foray into fiction. Billie Breslin has left California for New York, where she lands a job as an executive assistant to the editor
Read More →The grit is palpable in Joe Meno’s “Marvel and a Wonder.” So much so that at times I found myself forgetting that it took place in 1995 on a farm in Indiana and not out west in another century. The story starts with Jim Falls struggling to raise his grandson,
Read More →The timeframe of this book is the World War II years, the main characters are Henry Ford and his son, Edsel Ford, and the story is how the retooling of the manufacturing might of Detroit, so critically important to the winning of the war, was accomplished. Henry Ford was anti-war,
Read More →“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.” For those who are already fans of the wildly popular podcast, there’s not much I need to say other than be careful
Read More →“I am Mary Iris Malone, and I am not okay.” Mim has believed this for the past 16 years of her life. Mim lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her father and stepmother, Kathy, but she refers to her hometown as Mosquitoland, and it doesn’t feel like home. After discovering
Read More →Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” has recently reprinted her 1998 publication, “Black Glass.” With these 15 short stories, novelist Fowler delivers an inventive, provocative collection. The title story is the lengthiest and perhaps the most elaborate. With innovative fashion, Fowler
Read More →Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell has developed a following with titles like “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers.” His newest book, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants,” follows his familiar formula of combining scientific studies with personal stories to challenge conventional wisdom and readers’ assumptions about the
Read More →Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel, “Purity,” is his most contemporary novel to date, dealing with subjects such as student debt, the Internet, hackers/leakers and murder. “Purity” is Franzen’s most worldly novel, with parts taking place in Germany and Bolivia, as well as Oakland and Denver. It is stylistically similar to his
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