Michael Crummey's Galore Doubleday- Random House, 2009 Yes, it's true: I have fallen under another bookspell. Unlike the two instances of this earlier in my reading year, with Sarah Waters and Hiromi Goto, this is with an author I haven't read before: Michael Crummey. And perhaps it is because I am
Karen Russell "The Dredgeman's Revelation" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 July 26, 2010 issue This is the first of The New Yorker's 20Under40 stories that has left me feeling absolutely certain that I'll be following up with a longer work by the writer. (Not including the writers whose work
Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End Little Brown, 2007 One might accuse writers like Doug Harris and Joshua Ferris of trying to be clever in having chosen unusual narrative perspectives for their novels: You comma Idiot is told in the second-person and Then We Came to the End
Daphne Du Maurier's The Birds (1952) Arrow Books, 1992 Virago Modern Classic No. 498 My favourite story from this collection is "The Apple Tree". Partly because I've long believed that there is more to a tree than one might think, thanks to years of reading L.M. Montgomery's novels, in which
Dinaw Mengestu "An Honest Exit" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 July 12/19, 2010 issue The story begins with an imagined conversation: "Thirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the
