Staff Picks
April 15, 2013
James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much Returns From the Grave. Again. 3
by Bill Morris
Read this dark dirty lovely country-noir masterpiece already.
April 2, 2013
Staff Pick: Terese Svoboda’s Tin God 0
by Emily St. John Mandel
There’s a feeling, reading this book, of encountering something that hasn’t been done before. It seems to me that Terese Svoboda is a true original.
March 26, 2013
Staff Pick: Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds 1
by Hannah Gersen
When Terry Tempest Williams’s mother was dying, she told her daughter that she was leaving her journals to her, with one condition — that Williams wait until after her death to read them. Williams honored her mother’s wish and when she finally opened the journals she was shocked to find that every one of them was blank. When Women Were Birds is a memoir that explores this extraordinary gesture.
March 8, 2013
Staff Picks: Tell Me A Riddle 3
by Garth Risk Hallberg
“I Stand Here Ironing” is a story about a working mother, but to call it that — even to call it the best story ever written about a working mother — feels reductive. Work-life balance may now be the stuff of Atlantic cover stories and Lean In, but in 1961, exploring it in fiction was a downright radical act.
February 28, 2013
What We Talk about When We Talk about Crying: John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars 9
by Janet Potter
When we talk about The Fault in Our Stars, we go straight to the unspeakable sadness, out of all the emotions evoked, because we want to convey the incredible emotional resonance of the book. What we’re trying to say is: this book mattered deeply to me, I think it could matter deeply to you too.
February 27, 2013
Love in the Bottom Rung: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself 0
by Janet Potter
The characters have nothing to hope for but love, the one resource that can’t be rationed. The most depressing love affairs — emotionless, unrequited, exploitative — shine with promise in these settings.