Tag: literary fiction

  • Sunshine and shadows

    Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson Memory is such a complicated thing. It’s always fascinating to compare memories with a sibling or other person with whom you shared a long-ago experience. Sometimes details will be radically different; sometimes one person may have no recollection at all of something that made a vivid, lasting impression on another.…

  • Love, marriage and so much more

    Bob Moyer takes a look at a novel that’s small in size but big in scope. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer DEPT. OF SPECULATION. By Jenny Offill. Alfred A. Knopf. 177 pages. $22.95. This concise, evocative novel (readable in one sitting) takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through that treacherous theme park known…

  • Disaster, public and private

    If you haven’t discovered the books of Chris Bohjalian, you need to. I first encountered his work in Secrets of Eden (December, 2009), which impressed me a great deal. Since then, I’ve been equally impressed by The Sandcastle Girls and The Light in the Ruins  (both of which are reviewed here). The man has written…

  • Aesthetics vs. pragmatism – what really matters?

    Bob Moyer is back, taking a thoughtful look at a novel that depicts the travails of Germans and others caught up in the horrors of the cataclysm that was World War II. By Robert Moyer THE LIFE OF OBJECTS. By Susanna Moore. Alfred A. Knopf. 240 pages. $25. Beatrice, a bright young Irish girl, yearns…

  • When reality and conscience collide

    I somehow missed reading Tracy Chevalier’s international best-selling novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring, which became an Oscar-nominated movie. Missing such books that everyone else is reading is one of the perils of being a book-review editor; if someone else is reviewing a book for me, I often feel that my reading the book would…