Search

Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red. Tr. by Erdag Goknar. Oct. 2001. 384p. illus. Knopf, $25.95 (0-375-40695-6). A dead man, a dog, a murderer, a coin, two lovers, and a [...]

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (LJ 8/94) is popular not only with those readers who loved her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My [...]

Lively book discussions often owe their success to the choice of a title that inspires participants to make connections between events and characters in the selected book and those in [...]

Cusset, Catherine. The Story of Jane. S. & S. Sept. 2001. c.304p. ISBN 0-7432-0299-6. $24. F When Jane Cook, a fortysomething professor of French at a prestigious Eastern college, reads [...]

Dressler, Mylene. The Deadwood Beetle. Sept. 2001. 240p. Putnam/BlueHen, $23.95 (0-399-14805-1). Dressler's second novel, following her well-reviewed The Medusa Tree (1997), is a spare and elegant work about memory and [...]

Now that the injunction filed by Margaret Mitchell's heirs to prevent publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (LJ 5/1/01) is a distant memory, readers who enjoyed Randall's reimagining [...]

Summer seems to be just the right time for light reading: a little heat and sun tend to addle the brain and make it difficult to read heavy tomes. Luckily [...]

Schickler, David. Kissing in Manhattan. Dial. 2001. c.275p. ISBN 0-385-33566-0. $21.95. F These 11 loosely connected stories (some previously published in Zoetrope and The New Yorker) are aimed at a [...]

* Lennon, J. Robert. On the Night Plain. Holt. Aug. 2001. c.256p. ISBN 0-8050-6722-1. $23. F It's clear from the first page of his quietly stunning third novel that Lennon [...]

(*) Readers, Reading and Librarians. Haworth. (Acquisitions Librarian, Vol. 13, No. 25). 2000. 205p. ed. by Bill Katz. index. ISBN 0-7890-0699-5. $49.95. Editor Katz has assembled a readable, thoughtful, and [...]

Buckley, William F., Jr. Elvis in the Morning. Harcourt. Jul. 2001. c.336p. LC 00-054484. ISBN 0-15-100643-1. $25. F Fast on the heels of Spytime, National Review founder and former Firing [...]

Cokal, Susann. Mirabilis. July 2001. 320p. Putnam/BlueHen, $24.95 (0-399-14753-5). In 1372 a French village is under siege by the British. The citizenry are starving to death, when a miraculous event [...]

Long, Goldberry M. Juniper Tree Burning. June 2001. 464p. Simon & Schuster, $25 (0-7432-0203-1). Overwrought, overwritten, and way too long, this first (and, from all appearances, autobiographical) novel is yet [...]

Ward Just's A DANGEROUS FRIEND (Houghton. 1999. ISBN 0-395-85698-1. $23; pap. Mariner. 2000. ISBN 0-618-05670-X. $13; LJ 3/15/99) was a New York Times Book of the Year and an ALA [...]

An ALA Notable Book (and Oprah selection), Andre Dubus III's HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (Norton. 1999. ISBN 0-393-04697-4. $25.95; pap. Vintage. 2000. ISBN 0-375-72734-5. $14; LJ 3/1/99) is the [...]

Australian novelist Tim Winton's THE RIDERS (Scribner. 1996. ISBN 0-684-82277-6. pap. $12; LJ 3/15/95) concerns a man obsessed with the fate of his missing wife. When Fred Scully's seven-year-old daughter [...]

Ernest Gaines's A LESSON BEFORE DYING (Vintage. 1997. ISBN 0-375-70270-9. pap. $12; LJ 4/1/93) was a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book, and [...]

The protagonist in Frederick Busch's 18th work of fiction, GIRLS (Fawcett. 1998. ISBN 0-449-91263-9. pap. $12; LJ 2/1/97), is Jack, a college security guard whose marriage is falling apart under [...]

Mary Doria Russell's THE SPARROW (Fawcett. 1997. ISBN 0-449-91255-8. pap. $12.95) is often mistakenly categorized as science fiction, with the result that many book groups avoid it and miss both [...]

Choosing good books for your reading group is one of the most challenging (and rewarding) aspects of getting together for an evening of interesting and stimulating discussion. How do you [...]

IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS (Penguin. 1995. ISBN 0-14-025094-8. pap. $12.95; LJ 8/94), by Tim O'Brien, was a New York Times Notable Book, an ALA Notable Book, and the [...]

Lipman, Elinor. The Dearly Departed. Random. Jun. 2001. c.256p. LC 00-067368. ISBN 0-679-46312-7. $23.95. F Readers can count on Lipman for stylish, sprightly novels imbued with a deep affection for [...]

With Signs & Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction. Ed. by Daniel M. Jaffe. May 2001. 360p. Invisible Cities; dist. by IPG, $26 (0-9679683-5-6). In his thoughtful introduction [...]

Thai, Ho Anh. The Women on the Island. Tr. by Phan Thanh Ho, Celeste Bacchi, and Wayne Karlin. June 2001. 176p. Univ. of Washington, $30 (0-295-98086-9); paper, $16.95 (0-295-98108-3). Born [...]

Horn, Shifra. The Fairest among Women. Tr. by H. Sacks. July 2001. 304p. St. Martin's, $23.95 (0-312-26590-5). From the author of Four Mothers (1999) comes this magic-realist family history of [...]

With the April release of the movie version of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (starring Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant), there's sure to be renewed interest in other [...]

Chalfoun, Michelle. The Width of the Sea. CliffStreet: HarperCollins. May 2001. c.336p. LC 00-47400. ISBN 0-06-019908-3. $25. F Times are changing for the worse in Rosaline, a New England fishing [...]

From Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, there has long been a tradition of social activism in American literature. In recent years, however, expressing political [...]

Kalogridis, Jeanne. The Burning Times. Apr. 2001. 392p. Simon & Schuster, $25 (0-684-86923-3). The conflict between the Catholic Church and the 'old religion' that focused on the worship of the [...]

Searles, John. Boy Still Missing. Morrow. 2001. c.304p. LC 00-040758. ISBN 0-688-17570-8. $25. F In his first novel, an overly complicated coming-of-age story, Searles, the senior books editor at Cosmopolitan, [...]

Humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, What elicits guffaws from one person often seems less than funny to another. And tastes and styles of humor change. [...]

After writing two works of serious nonfiction (one on polio and the Salk vaccine and the other on the influential interior designer Elsie de Wolfe), Jane S. Smith makes a [...]

You don't have to like baseball to love Steve Kluger's charming and funny LAST DAYS OF SUMMER (Bard. 1999. ISBN 0-380-79763-1. pap. $12; LJ 6/15/98). Joey Margolis, who is 12 [...]

In William Kotzwinkle's THE BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN (Doubleday. 1996. ISBN 0-385-48428-3. $22.50; pap. Holt. 1997. ISBN 0-8050-5438-3. $14), a bear scuffling through the Maine woods in search of [...]

Ever wonder how fire was first adapted for use by mankind? Or who came up with the idea of people living in caves rather than in trees? What about the [...]

The world of academia has long been a popular setting for satire, from Mary McCarthy's classic The Groves of Academe (1951) to Jane Smiley's benign Moo (LJ 3/15/00) and James [...]