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Review by Alex Shephard Graduation is supposed to signify an end and a beginning, the transition between the ivory tower and the “real world.” But in The Marriage Plot, his first novel since Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize almost a decade ago, Jeffrey Eugenides follows three newly-minted graduates to question the idea of a clean break between these two periods. In the process, he renders familiar insecurities, frustrations, and transformations into the most convincing and authentic portrait of post-graduate life in recent memory. Like the thousands of students who are receiving their diplomas in June 1982, the trio of students […]

Review by Rachel Syme When The Year of Magical Thinking appeared in 2005, it established Joan Didion as the high priestess of anointed grief counselors — her meticulous and minimalist memoir of losing her husband to heart failure hit a cultural and emotional chord that continues to reverberate. In Blue Nights, Didion’s new memoir, she turns to motherhood with a similar clinical detachment — again a shock, but in this case, one that feels much more uncomfortable. Didion’s gimlet eye is always welcome; the conclusions that she draws from it, maybe less so. Two months before Magical Thinking‘s publication, Didion’s 39-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana […]

Review by Michael Schaub Over 17 years have passed since the world was shocked by the Rwandan Genocide, the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens of the east African nation. The massacre had its roots in the longstanding blood feud between the country’s main ethnic groups, the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. After the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, in 1994, government forces and militias raped and murdered Tutsi citizens (as well as some uncooperative Hutus). These series of atrocities forms the backdrop of Naomi Benaron’s debut novel Running the Rift, the winner of the […]

Review by Michele Filgate A couple of years ago, Paul Harding set the standard for slender books with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Tinkers. It’s appropriate, then, that he wrote a glowing blurb for Justin Torres’ We the Animals, a fiercely gorgeous debut that doesn’t quite crest 150 pages. In startlingly brief chapters, Torres sketches a bold portrait of childhood scars and imprinted memories. He writes of brotherhood, family, sexuality, identity, and innocence lost. Through the vantage point of its unnamed narrator, the novel traces one American family: the narrator and his brothers Manny and Joel, plus Ma (a white woman) […]