Your mileage may vary, but I Ioved A Visit from the Goon Squad and I love Egan’s new book, The Candy House, even more. It keeps verging on being another boring dystopia and then, happily, going off into a much more interesting space. Read more at 4columns.org.

Lack of confidence is not what characterizes Bette Howland’s work. It’s more like an underlying assumption that she isn’t quite the right person: an anxiety of identity that first creates writers and then undermines them. It’s a second-guessing game…

I reviewed Erdrich’s stunning The Night Watchman for Trouw. “Layer by layer, incident by incident–a kiss, a funeral, a political meeting–Erdrich builds an intimate and powerful narrative about American history in all its troubled beauty.”

At the beginning of The Sentence, Louise Erdrich’s darkly funny and wickedly brilliant new novel, an Ojibwe woman named Tookie faces a long prison term for illegally transporting a dead body. She looks up the word sentence and stares miserably at “its yawning c, belligerent little e’s . . . its hissing sibilants and double […]