- Books: “My Father’s Fortune.”
8220;My father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow,” the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn writes, in a wry, unsentimental, but deeply felt family history, which doubles as a portrait of twentieth-century British middle-class life. Frayn’s father, a self . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Betrayal” review.
The effects of repression replace those of deprivation in this sequel to Dunmore’s “The Siege,” which was set during the long siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. It’s now 1952, and Anna and Andrei have made a happy life for themselves and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Driving Home.”
In 1990, Raban left London “on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons.” He met someone, he tells us, and made for Seattle, the “far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career.” The essays collected here describe, among other things, his attempts to get . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “A Reader on Reading.”
Lectures, columns, and other occasional writings are gathered here to form a meditation on “the art of reading.” Thoughtful interrogations of the value of identity labels like “Jewish fiction” or “gay fiction” and the relationship between writers and editors mix with ruminations on the . . ....
- Books: “Mr g” review.
A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Catherine Chung’s “Forgotten Country” review.
This début novel depicts the delicate ways in which families hurt and heal one another. Janie, the oldest daughter of a Korean immigrant family in Detroit, has always felt a special responsibility for her sister, Hannah. When Hannah goes missing, just before their father receives a diagnosis of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Tad Friend: Andrew Stanton, “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” director tries live action.
If Andrew Stanton’s career has taught him anything, it’s the power of toys, fish, and robots. Stanton was the lead writer of Pixar Animation Studios’ “Toy Story” trilogy; he also wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” about a father fish’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Thomas Mallon’s “Watergate” review.
Historical fiction that unfolds with the urgency of a thriller, this novel about the Watergate scandal is narrated from multiple points of view, from the President’s to the Plumbers’—a technique that reveals the schizophrenic medley of allegiances and power dynamics that contributed to the downfall . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Wonderstruck” review.
Two children set out on parallel journeys, fifty years apart, that culminate in New York City museums. Rose’s search for the mother who abandoned her and Ben’s quest for the man he suspects to be his father quickly turn into voyages of self-discovery, with a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Noon” review.
In this collection of four linked stories, Rehan Tabassum grows up in Delhi with his strong-willed single mother and sets out to “enjoy his strange patrimony”—his father being a Pakistani media tycoon with an array of in-fighting heirs and informers. Tabassum’s sprawling . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Book of Life” review.
Betrayal and forgiveness infuse this impressive début collection. In the title story, a family man surprises himself with his readiness to take his business partner’s daughter to bed; in others, a husband finds himself playing host to his wife’s lover, a struggling lawyer sleeps . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->THE CENTER FOR FICTION
In celebration of New York Review Books’ new translation of Gregor von Rezzori’s “An Ermine in Czernopol,” the writer Deborah Eisenberg and the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn read from the novel. (17 E. 47th St. For reservations, which . . ....
- Books: Carlina Di Robertis’s “Perla” review.
In this haunting second novel, Perla, a privileged Argentinean student, shoulders the legacy of the period in which tens of thousands were “disappeared” by the Argentinean military dictatorship. Struggling to balance her love for her father, a Navy officer, with the knowledge that he was complicit in horrific . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Almost a Family.”
Darnton was a baby when his father, a correspondent for the Times, was killed while covering the Pacific War. In the years that followed, the absent father became an inspiring but daunting paragon—“leader among men, someone who was courageous and idealistic, unafraid in war, suave and debonair . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Outlaw Album” review.
In this collection’s twelve stories, Woodrell expands upon the unremittingly bleak portrait of Ozark life drawn in his novel “Winter’s Bone” and in the acclaimed film based on it. In one, a young woman tends to a rapist who was brain-damaged when she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Pearl Buck in China.”
Emphasizing the imagination’s power to “make bearable things too ugly to confront directly,” Spurling sensitively traces the biographical background of Buck’s writing. Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent nearly all of the first forty-two years of her life in China, and her childhood . . ....
- Books: “Calling Mr. King” review.
In this moody comedy, an American hit man’s admiration for a victim’s English country estate grows into a passion for European art and architecture that disrupts his career. The improbable plot moves through the museums, bookstores, and streets of London, New York, and Barcelona as the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Lives of Margaret Fuller” review.
This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “After the Fire, a Still Small Voice”
Frank last visited his family’s shack, on a Queensland beach, as a gas-huffing teen-ager, battered by his mother’s death and his father’s abusive neglect. He returns an alcoholic man, “the bloody feel of some bastard terrible thing swimming inside him,” . . ....
- Books: “Princess Noire.”
8220;Princess Noire” was the original, unused title of Nina Simone’s autobiography, and Cohodas duly appropriates it for her account of the singer’s life and career. Simone, born Eunice Waymon and nurtured as a child prodigy, devoted her early years to classical piano. After a . . ....
- Books: “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” review.
8220;Literary criticism is an indispensable stethoscope in the biographer’s bag,” Leibowitz writes, in this sweeping biography of William Carlos Williams, a titan of modernist poetry who also treated patients as a family physician in northern New Jersey. Leibowitz combs the poems for clues to Williams’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Sometimes There Is a Void” review.
Born into a prominent South African activist family, Mda fled to Lesotho at the age of fifteen to join his father, a radical lawyer living in exile. He went on to become one of the most celebrated playwrights and novelists of the post-apartheid era. In this long and unfailingly . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Benjamin Busch’s “Dust to Dust” review.
In this memoir, Busch, an actor and a former U.S. Marine, narrates his life in terms of materials and elements rather than stories and characters. Vignettes from his childhood, in upstate New York, his two deployments in Iraq, and his more recent family life on a farm in Michigan are . . . (Subscription required.)...
