Category: Nonfiction

Amazing book, filled with grief and love and beauty and joy and Doty’s distinctive gorgeous prose, way of seeing, eye for detail. On the back cover, a blurb from Michael Cunningham: “During the time I was reading Heaven’s Coast I found myself wanting to call everyone I knew and say, ‘Stop whatever you’re doing and…

A year in books, books re-read, musings on why certain stories resonate, theories on literature, on authors, on characters, wide-ranging references and quotations, lists, personal details of day-to-day living (travel, the weather, Manguel’s home in France). This book is a lovely hodge-podge of all of these things, and it makes me want to go read…

Brooks describes himself as a “comic sociologist,” and the best parts of this book, I think, are the humorous ones, the amusingly exaggerated descriptions of suburban America and what you find there: price clubs and other big-box mega-retailers, chain restaurants, softball teams, competitive mothers. Brooks’s primary argument, which is that middle America actually has unplumbed…