Featured Reviews: Adult Books
Death, Revisited: ‘Where Reasons End,’ by Yiyun Li, and ‘The White Book,’ by Han Kang
There is no shortage of books about coping with death. Joan Didion’s devastating account of the year following the demise of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, comes to mind. Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her then-55-year-old mother’s death on Christmas Day in 2008 from metastatic colorectal cancer, is equally profound and heart-wrenching. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air — each written from a medical professional’s perspective (and in Kalanithi’s case, also as the dying patient) — pushed the boundaries of our collective understanding about what it means to confront and even learn to embrace … [Read More...]
The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash
There’s something weirdly fascinating about a celebrity crackup — especially a fantastically dramatic one that takes place in a public space. Famous people supposedly have the keys to the kingdom. What makes them call it quits? In most cases, it certainly isn’t lack of funds. But a cheating romantic partner, perhaps? Drug addiction? The absence of perceived success? For Buddy Winter, star of Tom Barbash’s new novel and the host of an Emmy-winning late-night talk show, none of these reasons are what caused him to suffer a mental breakdown during his opening monologue and walk off the set for good. His marriage to Emily, the love of his life, was still very much intact. His show’s … [Read More...]
Featured Reviews: Adult Books
The Parade by Dave Eggers
If you’ve read any of Dave Eggers’ fiction in the last few years, you’re probably well aware that straight-up family-drama novels are not really his shtick. In the past decade, amid works of narrative nonfiction, children’s novels, and various long-form articles for such media outlets as the New York Times and the New Yorker, he’s churned out a quasi-allegory about the disgruntled and economically disintegrating middle-class America via a story about a man going through a midlife crisis (A Hologram for the King); an analysis of the boundaries (or lack thereof) of privacy, ethics and personal freedom in the age of the Internet via a young woman’s foray into working for a powerful social media company (The Circle); and a particularly ardent message-driven novel … [Read More...]
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
If you’re anything like me, animal-companion novels aren’t really your bag. Some are a smidge too cloying. Others are embarrassingly trite. Call it erring on the side of being unnecessarily cynical but, for me, books dedicated to spelling out the deep connection between man and beast elicit more eye rolls than epiphanies. So it was with a mix of skepticism and resignation that I picked up Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Already a best-seller in Japan and translated by the great Philip Gabriel (the award-winning translator of renowned works by Haruki Murakami and Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe), it did have a lot going for it. Still, I was prepared to hate it. Weirdly enough, I didn’t. … [Read More...]
Read an interview with me for Literary Hub’s cool new ‘Book Marks’ feature