Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning” was met with bafflement and awe when it appeared in 1977. Reality has finally caught up to his masterpiece. Read more
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Tag: Literary Fiction
‘State of Paradise’ by Laura van den Berg
With exquisite prose, smart lines on every page, a building sense of growing strangeness tinged with dread, and surprises all the way to the end, State of Paradise might be van den Berg’s best novel so far — and that’s saying a lot. A narrative that constantly feels like its dancing on the border between fiction and nonfiction despite all the weirdness it contains, this book is at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don’t miss it. Read more
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‘Bear’ by Julia Phillips
In the beautiful and haunting latest from Phillips (Disappearing Earth), two 20-something sisters contend with economic precarity and their mother’s terminal illness on present-day San Juan Island, Wash. Read more
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Caleb Azumah Nelson Wins £20,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for ‘Small Worlds’
British-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for his second novel Small Worlds, which judges described as “symphonic” and “viscerally moving”. Read more
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‘The Sympathizer’ Adaptation Premieres April 14th
The Sympathizer, the new HBO Original Limited Series from Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr. and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, premieres April 14 on Max. Watch trailer
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10 Writers Win 2024 Whiting Awards for Emerging Authors
Each writer will receive $50,000 to help support their craft — one of largest awards granted to new authors. A number of past Whiting winners have gone on to publish award-winning and bestselling works, including Hernan Diaz, Catherine Lacey, Colson Whitehead, Alice McDermott and Ocean Vuong. Read more
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‘What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez’ wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” a hard-hitting and comic novel set in New York City about a Puerto Rican family’s search for a missing girl, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Read more
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‘James’ by Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s new novel amends Mark Twain’s classic tale [Huckleberry Finn] with the enslaved sidekick, Jim, at its center … What sets “James” above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being. Read more
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‘Beautyland’ by Marie-Helene Bertino
A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty. Read more
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The Master Fabulist of American Fiction
Millhauser reminds you of Borges sometimes, of Calvino and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. Millhauser has a Nicholson Baker-like gift for meticulous, closeup description of the ordinary, but his world is also one that may be inhabited by ghosts, a realm where paintings and postcards come to life, where people can vanish or fly on carpets, and where it’s possible for someone to cohabitate with a frog. Read more
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