fiction Archive

I don’t know about you, but I spent all of last week glued to Twitter, following the manhunt in Boston, the explosion in West Texas and the earthquake in China. I knew the Pulitzers had been announced (and that this year’s board had avoided last year’s misstep in the Fiction category) but until this

The protagonist of Harriet Lane’s debut novel Alys, Always (I reviewed it here last year) was remarkably good at putting me on my guard. She raised all sorts of fascinating questions about what motivates us when it comes to the narratives we tell ourselves and others about ourselves and others. So I was thrilled

Mary Gordon is probably the first who comes to mind when I think of women writers writing fiction about women self-identifying in relation to their children, mothers, and lovers. See her haunting Pearl, for example, or the three novellas published together as The Rest of Life, which I’m currently reading. So it’s not surprising

When it comes to science, most publications are either research-oriented or biographical. But to put the reader in the mind of the scientist as he or she is making the greatest discoveries of history takes a fiction writer. These three re-imaginings of the lives of scientists humanize their subjects outside of and in light

Rules of Civility: A Novel by Amor Towles Penguin, 2011 352 Pages (Paperback) Available Amazon Powell’s Take a quick-thinking, ambitious Bronte heroine, put a chilled cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and set her in a dusky Manhattan jazz bar on the eve of 1938. That’s Katey Kontent, and she’s

Nancy Pearl describes “friend-maker” novels as “books that are so idiosyncratic that when you stumble across someone who has not only read but loved the book as much as you have, you know you’ve made a friend for life.” I’d be hard pressed to come up with an exhaustive list of my friend-makers, but

Short stories are often the basis of films, probably because they allow for such a range of interpretation. These three widely-divergent short films were inspired by some of our favorite classic stories. How do these films compare to your interpretation of the originals? 1) You haven’t appreciated the power of stop-motion legos until you’ve

Eudora Welty, in her essay “What place has place in fiction?,” declares that setting is crucial because it is “the ground conductor of all the currents of emotions and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course.” Place sets the fictional character “to scale in his proper world to