Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
Bass, Rick. All the Land to Hold Us. Houghton Harcourt. Jul. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9780547687124. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780547687438. LITERARY FICTION It’s not surprising that exemplary nature writer Bass’s fourth novel, set in Texas, features salt miners and oil and gas wildcatters. But you’ll also meet Baptists, high school football players, a local beauty, a [...]
Adler, Elizabeth. Please Don’t Tell. Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Jul. 2013. 384p. ISBN 9781250019899. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250019905. WOMEN’S FICTION One stormy night on the California coast, elegant 58-year-old Fenny Dexter opens her door to a blood-soaked man claiming to have been in an accident. He departs after a cozy night (they feel a spark), and [...]
So many eye-popping short story collections, so many revelatory small-press literary novels, and such little space on those end-of-the-year Best lists. Fortunately, I have a venue for featuring Best Indie Novels and Best Stories Collections of 2012, which you’ll find presented below. In addition, since I get far too much good material throughout the year [...]
al-Shaykh, Hanan. One Thousand and One Nights: A Sparkling Retelling of the Beloved Classic. Pantheon. Jun. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9780307958860. $26; eISBN 9780307958877. LITERATURE A crucial and sometimes controversial figure in Middle Eastern literature, Lebanese author al-Shaykh here translates 19 of the stories young queen Shahrazad told her husband each night so that he would [...]
Brown, Eli. Cinnamon and Gunpowder. Farrar. Jun. 2013. 272p. ISBN 9780374123666. $26. HISTORICAL Evocative title, and the plot sounds like a hoot. In 1819, the pirate Mad Hannah Mabbot kills the lord of a booming tea concern but will spare his chef, the famous Owen Wedgwood, as long as he manages to serve her an [...]
Angel, Katherine. Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell. Farrar. Jun. 2103. 304p. ISBN 9780374280406. $26. SOCIAL SCIENCE/WOMEN’S STUDIES In her discussion of female sexual desire, Angel draws on personal experience, but this is hardly memoir. A postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University in England, Angel [...]
Aldrich, Alexandra. The Astor Orphan: A Memoir. Ecco: HarperCollins. Apr. 2013. 256p. ISBN 9780062207937. $24.99; eISBN 9780062207968. lrg prnt. MEMOIR The name Astor conjures up the glorious Gilded Age, but by the time Aldrich came along, the Astors were a pretty tarnished bunch. Aldrich lived with her family in the servants’ quarters of Rokeby, the [...]
Bill, Frank. Donnybrook. Farrar. Mar. 2013. 256p. ISBN 9780374532895. pap. $15. LITERARY FICTION Bill’s debut story collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana, raised a collective gasp, so this first novel has been greatly anticipated. The subject is a bloody, three-day, bare-knuckle fight called the Donnybrook, held on a 1000-acre plot in isolated southern Indiana. As bettors [...]
Hamid, Mohsin. How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Mar. 2013. 240p. ISBN 9781594487293. $26.95. LITERARY FICTION The title could come from one of those get-rich-quick books that the young and ambitious eat up, and in fact Hamid imaginatively uses that genre’s format to shape his narrative. But this is [...]
Dee, Jonathan. A Thousand Pardons. Random. Feb. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9780812993219. $26; eISBN 9780679645009. LITERARY A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 with Chang-Rae Lee (Jennifer Egan won for A Visit from the Goon Squad), Dee goes au courant with the story of a woman who returns to work after her corporate-lawyer husband loses all following [...]
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