Search

In ''Goldenseal,'' Maria Hummel takes readers into a hotel room, then unfurls her characters' complicated history. GOLDENSEAL, by Maria Hummel Maria Hummel's new novel, ''Goldenseal,'' begins in 1990, when Edith [...]

THE MERCIES By Kiran Millwood Hargrave On Christmas Eve 1617, a catastrophic storm hit the remote Finnmark region of Norway, drowning 40 men from the fishing village of Vardo in [...]

THE BIRD KING By G. Willow Wilson Readers who enjoy G. Willow Wilson's ''Ms. Marvel'' comics (as my 10-year-old son and I do) know with what a deft, sympathetic hand [...]

THE ROMANCE READER'S GUIDE TO LIFE By Sharon Pywell 308 pp. Flatiron Books. $25.99. Neave Terhune, one of the two narrators of Sharon Pywell's third novel, is a book thief. [...]

JUDASBy Amos OzTranslated by Nicholas de Lange305 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25. In a 2005 interview, George Saunders remarked that ''all moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns.'' He [...]

THE LIFE OF ELVES By Muriel Barbery Translated by Alison Anderson 258 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $17. Muriel Barbery's previous novels, ''The Elegance of the Hedgehog'' and ''Gourmet Rhapsody,'' took [...]

THE WATERY PART OF THE WORLD By Michael Parker 261 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $23.95. American history brims with stories of mysterious disappearances. We still wonder what happened [...]

READING LIKE A WRITER A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. By Francine Prose. 273 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $23.95. At the start [...]

IT'S one of the most cherished American myths: that in the vast sprawl of our varied landscape, personal destinies can unfold without limits. Here, we like to believe, people are [...]

THE TAKING By J. D. Landis. 384 pp. New York: Ballantine Books. $24.95. THE title of J. D. Landis's third novel refers to the confiscation of land required to build [...]

THE LITTLE WOMEN By Katharine Weber. 240 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23. KATHARINE WEBER'S three novels all concern written documents. Her first, ''Objects in Mirror Are Closer [...]

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS By Cheryl Mendelson. 326 pp. New York: Random House. $24.95. WHEN the characters in Cheryl Mendelson's first novel are looking for entertainment, they often pick up the works [...]

PUSHKIN A Biography. By Elaine Feinstein. Ecco, $29.95. Elaine Feinstein's biography of Aleksandr Pushkin is perhaps somewhat too slim. There is little material that will be new to scholars. Yet [...]

THE ANNIVERSARY And Other Stories. By Louis Auchincloss. 192 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $25. THE title story in Louis Auchincloss's new book -- his 55th -- begins with its [...]

LETTERS IN CAPTIVITY, 1945-1946 By Ezra and Dorothy Pound. Edited by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo. Oxford University, $35. In the summer of 1940, the poet Ezra Pound began delivering [...]

MR. DARWIN'S SHOOTER By Roger McDonald. 365 pp. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. $25. IN his engaging novel ''Mr. Darwin's Shooter,'' the Australian writer Roger McDonald imagines the life of [...]

TAKEN IN By Beverly Coyle. 305 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. LIKE many good book titles, ''Taken In'' points the reader in two directions. To take someone in can mean [...]

A CONSPIRACY OF TALL MEN By Noah Hawley. Harmony, $23. Linus Owen teaches conspiracy theory at a small college in northern California. But despite his belief in an array of [...]

OBLIVION On Writers & Writing. By Donald Justice. Story Line, paper, $14. The ''Oblivion'' of Donald Justice's title is twofold, referring both to the obscurity beyond literal sense to which [...]

POLITE LIES On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures. By Kyoko Mori. Holt, $22.50. Kyoko Mori, who chose to leave Japan at the age of 20 and has lived in [...]

SOUL KISS By Shay Youngblood. Riverhead, $21. Shay Youngblood's first novel gives a thoughtful girl's-eye view of growing up among elderly women, haunted by the ghosts of the missing and [...]

IF I WERE BOSS The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis. Edited by Anthony Di Renzo. Southern Illinois University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95. Sinclair Lewis is something of an oddity [...]

IMAGINING CHARACTERS Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. By A. S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre. Edited by Rebecca Swift. [...]

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE Essays on Fiction. By Charles Baxter. Graywolf, $22.95. Charles Baxter has a wicked talent for epigram that rarely surfaces in his fiction but serves his collection [...]

CREEK WALK And Other Stories. By Molly Giles. 129 pp. Watsonville, Calif.: Papier-Mache Press. $23 ''Whether you're on the beach or in bed with a lover or laughing with friends [...]

I WANT TO BUY A VOWEL A Novel of Illegal Alienation. By John Welter. Algonquin, $18.95. In his third novel, John Welter sets out to write a satire on the [...]

Other Entertainment Collected Pieces. By Ned Rorem. Simon & Schuster, $25. ''Out of Nantucket,'' the closing essay in Ned Rorem's new collection, ''Other Entertainment,'' transcends its sentimentality by painting a [...]

The Last Happy Occasion By Alan Shapiro. University of Chicago, $22.95. In the prologue to his memoir, ''The Last Happy Occasion,'' the poet Alan Shapiro writes that poetry ''brings us [...]

SUNDAY JEWS By Hortense Calisher. 694 pp. New York: Harcourt. $28. IN 1951, the year Bobby Thomson hit the 'shot heard round the world' into the stands at the Polo [...]

MY LITTLE. BLUE DRESS, by Bruno Maddox. (Penguin, $13.) This mock memoir of an Englishwoman born in 1900 is also a record of a dull and self-involved fictional author's efforts [...]

MY LITTLE BLUE DRESS By Bruno Maddox. 297 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. BRUNO MADDOX'S first novel, 'My Little Blue Dress,' begins as a send-up of a memoir, the life [...]