Category: Fiction

Every chapter of this book (the chapters rotate through the seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter) made me smile: each one was just as lovely as the last. Italy in the early ’50s, Italy in the mid ’60s: factory work, a polluted river, kids who ask their father, “Are cows like trams?” Marcovaldo…

Beautiful and obscure, flights of fancy, flights of language. A photographer and a writer: light, images, reflections, mirror-images. Constructions: creating the self, creating images, creating reflections. A clothing-optional tearoom, water everywhere, birds and plants and city streets, visions and dreams: no idea what’s past or present, what’s real or not (but in books, do such…

Hercule Poirot is clever and amusing, and it’s such fun to watch the drama of this book unfold: to get little clues here and there, but not to realize the full picture until Poirot explains it all at the end.

Weetzie Bat is all grown up (Cherokee and Witch Baby are in college!) and life with her secret-agent lover-man isn’t as perfect as it should be. So she packs a suitcase and heads off to the pink hotel, where, of course, she meets all sorts of interesting people, and all sorts of strange things happen.…

This book is watery and shifting and uneasy like the sea. It’s filled with wonderful small details: the grandfather who sets type and is composing a dictionary, the motel with rooms named after hurricanes, the big sprawling house that used to be apartments for sailors. A few moments seem too self-consciously literary: “‘You are the…

Oh, academia! I love how Byatt plays with genre, with the idea of romance in its various senses, with the chase/quest/race, with detective stories and novels and letters. I love how the texts that her characters are anaylzing are themselves a significant part of her own text: her protagonists are readers, and we have the…

The back cover quotes a review in the Washington Post proclaiming that this book is one of those that “are meant to be lived in for weeks.” It’s true, and not just because the hardcover edition is 800 pages. Clarke’s writing is urbane and beautiful and descriptive, very British and very wonderful. This book has…

The world that Sue Miller creates in Lost in the Forest is a rich one, full of detail. Reading this novel, you can nearly see the slant of light over Napa Valley’s vineyards, the sidewalks and shop windows of a town that’s newly a tourist attraction. As family dramas unfold, Miller almost always perfectly captures…

A quick and charming fable about the value of words, and how we should use them. The whimsy of the details (especially near the end!) makes up for any overdone sentimentality or didacticism.