Midlife Magic
/Emmanuel Carrere’s memoir is an uneasy blend of sexual fantasy and archival records, of a future with a beautiful young woman and a past haunted by a possible Nazi collaborator
Read MoreUppity Blues
/Master of the mannered sneak-attack, Kazuo Ishiguro has enraptured readers for years – including Karen Vanuska, who walks us through Nocturnes, his collection of linked stories.
Read MoreRoots Into Entrails
/A Nazi picaresque wouldn’t seem to be a likely read, but Karen Vanuska reviews a new reprint of Jakov Lind’s 1962 World War II novel Landscape in Concrete and finds its grim, absurd power undimmed by the years.
Read MoreHow to Wreck a Planet
/Jeanette Winterson has made a career of pushing her prose poetry into different worlds. But by abandoning Earth altogether, has she left her readers stranded? Karen Vanuska heretically challenges The Stone Gods.
Read MoreRescue Pieces
/Much critical buzz has accompanied Philipp Meyer’s debut novel American Rust (there’s talk of a Pulitzer)—Karen Vanuska cuts through the hype and attempts to nail down the thing itself.
Read MoreLike Diamonds on Display
/Karen Vanuska finds plenty to praise in Louise Erdrich’s The Red Convertible: New and Selected Stories—as well as some loose bolts and steam under the hood.
Read MoreA Woman Walks Into Her Therapist’s Office…
/Fans of Sylvia Brownrigg’s fiction admire the hidden complexity beneath its surface simplicity; we plumb the depths of The Delivery Room and Morality Tale with Karen Vanuska.
Read MoreMurders Most Foul
/What constitutes particularly Southern fiction? In reckoning Ron Rash’s Serena, Karen Vanuska goes below the Mason-Dixon line in search of something that sets Southern fiction apart – aside from all the dead bodies stacked like cordwood.
Read MoreStrange Bedfellows
/In America America, a suburban everyman like those in Ethan Canin’s stories and novels finds himself in the center of a scandal that leads to a presidential hopeful’s ruin. Karen Vanuska explores how well Canin navigates his character through the bumptious subject of highstakes political intrigue.
Read MoreThe Best Intentions
/As a startling suicide shows, evil is in the mundane details of Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street. Karen Vanuska follows the novel’s four main characters and tries to tease out the peril beneath their most pedestrian actions.
Read MoreWhispers Through the Curtain
/
For fifteen years a British and a Soviet family built a friendship by slipping letters past KGB censors. Karen Vanuska celebrates From Newbury with Love, a collection of their rich correspondence.
Read MoreUnder the Microscope
/Andrea Barrett’s novels and stories have been quiet, restrained affairs, but, as Karen Vanuska reports, her new book The Air We Breathe is given a stimulating shot in the arm by the intrusion of World War I.
Read MoreLimitless Apocalypse
/Karen Vanuska reviews Jim Crace’s post-apocalyptic novel The Pesthouse, in which Americans seek salvation by emigrating to Europe. Hmm, think Crace might be trying to tell us something…?
Read More
