(Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011) When I cracked open Stolen Pleasures, all I knew about Gina Berriault was that she was a California writer, a “writer’s writer” decked out with major awards but missing the name recognition to match. Before I … Continued
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr (New York, NY: Europa Editions, 2011) What about me? That was the question my boyfriend’s ten-year-old brother, J., asked approximately three dozen times over the short weekend during which we saw him recently. … Continued
Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait (New York, NY: Overlook Press, 2011) Miracles abound in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s new novel, Daniel Stein, Interpreter. Early on, Daniel Stein—a young Polish priest who has been forced to become a translator for the … Continued
When I first started Dana Spiotta’s new novel, Stone Arabia, it called to mind Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, another exploration of rock and roll—its fascination, its inarticulate articulateness, its enigmatic pull. That’s how I was reading it for the … Continued
“Where were you last night?” It’s not that she cared. His absence hadn’t kept her up. She’d fallen asleep as usual to the Home Shopping Network, last chance at that dragonfly brooch for only $19.95. She’d woken with the credit … Continued
Heaven must be dying on time at the end of a long life, family at one’s hands, goodbyes hovering like hummingbirds, which, if one is absolutely still, sometimes land on a finger and sip honey as if from nowhere. One … Continued