Category: Fiction

In her introduction to the edition I read, Elizabeth Hardwick describes Daisy Miller as “an intramural battle between middle-aged, deracinated American women long abroad and a young, provincial American girl whose naturalness and friendliness are more suitable to hometown streets than to the mysteries of European society.” Hardwick also talks about “the banal social proprieties…

Annie John is a coming-of-age novella; it tells the story of its narrator’s childhood and adolescence on the island of Antigua, from when she’s ten up to the point where she leaves for England at age seventeen. The changing nature of her relationship to her mother, as she grows older, is a big part of…

Wallace, the protagonist of Real Life, is in a graduate program in biochemistry in an unnamed Midwestern city (it’s Madison). When the book opens, his father has been “dead for several weeks” but that isn’t his main concern: he’s just found that the lab experiment he’s been doing all summer is probably ruined, and he…

I got this book from the library because the New Yorker described it as an “extraordinary début novel” that “records a young woman’s thoughts as she moves through a single day,” and further said this: “By arranging text in unconventional ways, Watson conveys the shapes and the rhythms of thought, and coheres scraps of consciousness…

A Tale for the Time Being is about lots of things: stories, and families, and memory, and history, and secrets, and time, and moments (zen and otherwise). It’s sometimes very heavy, but often very beautiful. Part of the novel is the diary of Nao, a teenage girl in Japan whose family lived in California when…

Hard Times is about what happens when, as one character puts it, a person (or a society, for that matter) thinks that “the wisdom of the Head” is “all-sufficient” and doesn’t think at all about “the wisdom of the Heart” (222). The lesson—that trying to live by rational self-interest alone is not the best path…

Piranesi (not his actual name) thinks of himself as the “Beloved Child of the House” where he lives: a house that is, as far as he can see, the entire world (163). It’s a strange world: Piranesi can walk from one gigantic room to another for miles upon miles and still only have traversed a…

I’m pretty sure I tried to read Emma in high school and didn’t get very far: I think I found it dull and put it down in a hurry. This second attempt at reading it was much more enjoyable, maybe in part because I saw Autumn de Wilde’s film adaptation of it earlier this year…

“I wanted to send you an open horizon,” one character writes to another in this book (121). They’ve never met; they may never meet. The character doing the writing is a teenager who is 1) worried about climate change, 2) protective of and infuriated by her sometimes-difficult/provocative younger brother, and 3) dealing with life in…

This second installment in the “Thursday Next” series is as fun and funny as the first, and I was delighted to read about Thursday’s continued adventures. In this one, there’s a found Shakespeare play, a lost husband, and several near-death experiences, as well as time travel, travel into various books, and an all-too-brief reappearance of…