The Known World by Edward P. Jones landed on my TBR when I heard him interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on “Writers & Company”. More than twenty years ago. But Jones was recently named for The Paris Review’s Hadada Award (nominated, received), and I determined this spring would see it
About a year ago, I was reading Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945) and it was such a gush of words that it was almost intoxicating; I found myself ordering a copy of The Man Who Loved Children (an earlier novel, perhaps her best-known overseas, in which I’d stalled
Perhaps independent presses are most vital in their willingness to confront, to engage with ideas and possibilities that make readers uncomfortable. Consider Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s book about reading James Baldwin and William Styron, which opens with this epigraph from Raoul Peck’s J’étouffe: “Forgive me in advance,
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
In which I read two books with #NovNov in mind, hosted by Rebecca and Cathy: one novella that feels like an expanded short story, and the other that swells with links of main character and themes across three segments. First published in Rio de Janeiro’s newspaper from 1881-1882 and
