THE FISHERMAN’S GIFT, by Julia R. Kelly “The Fisherman’s Gift” begins with a child washed up on a Scottish beach after a storm in 1900. A fisherman, Joseph, finds the boy, and carries him through the local village, Skerry Sands, past the shop where the novel’s Greek chorus of housewives gather, to the minister, who … Read more
Nadler then introduces us to Sonja’s mother, Fania, who immigrated to Montreal after the war and works as a masseuse. “If I press just slightly in the right spot,” she muses, she can “put a patient in mind of the past, of a room, for instance, that has been exploded, or incinerated by bombs, or … Read more
On Dec. 10, Michael Connelly stood on the patio behind his house in the Hollywood Hills and gazed down at a generous slice of the city he’s been writing about for 38 years. There were the spires of Hogwarts at Universal Studios. There was the 101 freeway, flowing steadily in both directions. There was the … Read more
HOT AIR, by Marcy Dermansky Marcy Dermansky’s new novel, “Hot Air,” begins with a hot-air balloon falling out of the sky and into a suburban swimming pool. The tech billionaire piloting the balloon, Jonathan Foster, is dumped out of the basket head first, and a bystander — our unlucky protagonist, Joanie, who is in the … Read more
THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER, by Stephen Graham Jones Stephen Graham Jones’s new novel would give Gen. Philip Sheridan fits. The Civil War officer is often cited as the source of one of the most infamous sayings in American history, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and there are dozens if not hundreds of … Read more
What is Panem? Panem is a fictionalized, future version of the United States. People in the country’s 12 districts, which loosely correspond to regions of the U.S., toil to supply resources to the Capitol, where the rich and powerful live. (“In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the … Read more
SAVING FIVE: A Memoir of Hope, by Amanda Nguyen There is a phrase that recurs at key points throughout Amanda Nguyen’s powerful memoir of activism and recovery, “Saving Five.” The first time we see it, it’s in the message she writes and tapes to her computer shortly after her rape on the Harvard campus: “Never … Read more
Herman Graf, a major and intrepid figure in independent publishing who sold copies of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” to bookstores after it was embroiled in a legal fight over whether it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Flushing, Queens. He was 91. His nephew Paul Lichter said the cause … Read more
Print magazines today are editorial starvelings. Journalism is among the most regretted college majors. Carter often had 400-page issues, with 140 pages of editorial to fill. In those pre-internet days, his staffers lived well. They expensed meals and flowers and hotel rooms and long black cars. (“Fashion is about long black cars when you need … Read more
A Trenchant Satire of the Cool Kids Who Moved to Berlin