Explore the Unique Architecture of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation, built around a wife’s ruminations on love, marriage, and art, has a narrative form unlike any you’ve read. Numerous short fragments—invoking everything from...
View ArticlePhillip Margulies Shares the Journey of Belle Cora’s Unforgettable Heroine
The best literary characters are so vivid and lifelike, their thoughts and struggles so resonant and engrossing, that you may forget they were in fact hatched in the mind of a writer. The muse...
View ArticleCase Closed: The True Story of a Happy Ending
The true-life 1930 disappearance of New York judge Joseph Force Crater remains a mystery to this day, but not so in Ariel Lawhon’s finely plotted novel, The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress. In...
View ArticleWhen Fact Informs Fiction: Susan Minot Gives Voice to Uganda’s Abducted Girls
Susan Minot’s extraordinary novel Thirty Girls takes its title from a tragedy that occurred in Aboke, a town in rural Uganda, in 1996. Rebel bandits from a Christian militant organization called the...
View ArticleLife Lessons from Mona Simpson’s Casebook
It all begins innocently enough: wanting to know more about a popular TV show being discussed at school, Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping on his mother. What he discovers, though, is more than he...
View ArticleSearching for Home in Sue Miller’s The Arsonist
Sue Miller’s The Arsonist begins with a homecoming. After fifteen years of working in East Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers....
View ArticleNovel Beginnings: A Conversation with the Author and the Editor of The Empire...
It takes talent, a lot of painstaking work, and a little bit of magic to bring a great book into the world. Such was the case for Alexis Landau’s debut historical novel The Empire of the Senses, a...
View ArticleArmchair Adventurer: Commemorating the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide
When Chris Bohjalian first set out to write The Sandcastle Girls, a remarkable love story unfolding against the terrifying backdrop of the Armenian genocide of 1915, he encountered skepticism regarding...
View ArticleThe Life-and-Death Decision of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act
In The Children Act, Ian McEwan uses the art of fiction and his formidable powers as a writer to illuminate the human drama behind an unusual court case. A seventeen-year-old boy requires a blood...
View ArticleRufi Thorpe’s Top 10 Books About Female Friendship
Ah, friendship. The twists, the turns…the long-lasting bonds and the occasional betrayals. With such rich material to mine, it’s no wonder that many novelists have turned to this theme in their...
View ArticleDigging Up the Past in The Buried Giant
Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most respected fiction writers of our time. A decade has passed since the release of his last novel, the acclaimed bestseller Never Let Me Go, so we at the Reading Group...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Book Club Kit for Great Circle
“I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed.”...
View Article
