This year’s Village Voice pick. I’d already written about the Le Guin collected stories and Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue,” so I chose Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” I heard her read the other day and was moved by her account of writing her way out of depression. Depression was like […]

“Telegraph Avenue” is unquestionably a Great American Novel, but at first glance you might not recognize it as such. Michael Chabon braids plot twists, extraneous details, and references to such low-culture manifestations as comic books and kung fu movies into his stories with an almost adolescent abandon. In America a new Chabon book is a major event, but outside the English-speaking world, his verbal extravagance and fond embrace of popular culture…

In nearly every story in “The Beautiful Indifference,” Sarah Hall achieves a fine balance of language and subject matter. Sometimes the sentences are introverted and brooding, the setting ominous. Sometimes the words are as stubborn and glowering as the characters they describe. Hall finds beauty in unlikely places: in a sudden outburst of rage, or […]

When twenty-year-old beatnik Patti Smith first moved to New York with Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket, she fell in love with a boy named Robert Mapplethorpe. Later she would become a rock star, he a provocative photographer who aestheticized the gay male body. But in the summer of 1967 he was an art student in […]

Fertility without end in the rain forest? Female sexuality as a swamp? It’s an old metaphor in male writing about women: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have begun using for their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them “wetlands”: the sites of a fecundity […]

“There but for the” was my best book of the year for the Voice. It was a novel I not only admired but enjoyed and read with pleasure–a surprisingly rare combination. It had no boring bits in the middle. https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/12/21/the-best-books-of-2011/

Madeleine Hanna loves books. On the very first page of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides shows us her bookshelves, full of old-fashioned authors—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James—whose works are meant to mark her as both a serious reader and an “incurable romantic.” On the next few pages, we discover that Madeleine has […]

At an unsuccessful dinner party in an expensive house in Greenwich, London, a man named Miles excuses himself just before dessert, goes upstairs, and locks himself into the spare bedroom. When his hosts, a materialistic couple called Genevieve and Eric, discover him there, he declines to come out. He pushes a note through the crack: […]

Lydia Davis writes in straightforward, elegant sentences about people whose thoughts are not straightforward at all. With gentle yet penetrating insight, she illuminates characters who are worried, puzzled about how to live their lives, not sure what to believe. They are drawn in by false notions, imagine nonexistent dangers, read philosophy but fail to understand […]

In her nine novels, the American writer Lionel Shriver has never been afraid to show her characters’ dark side. Grimly, and sometimes comically, she explores marriage and family life as sources of powerful, unsettling emotion. In 2005, she won the Orange Prize for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” told from the point of view […]