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PHILIPPE HAYS / REX FEATURES |
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F I C T I O N
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J O N A T H A N S T R A N G E & M R . N O R R E L L
B y S u s a n n a C l a r k e
Susanna Clarke's prose is a marvel: dry and witty and wise like Jane Austen, with lovely, limber, lyrical flights reminiscent of Fitzgerald. So why would a writer of her prodigious gifts choose to lavish them on a novel about two wizards, one old and crusty, one young and dashing, feuding and dueling their way through Napoleonic Europe? Because in her hands a fantasy novel is far, far more than escapism: it's a literary triumph, the real world reflected in a magic mirror in all its rich, strange, melancholy glory.—Lev Grossman
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G I L E A D
B y M a r i l y n n e R o b i n s o n
Marilynne Robinson waited more than two decades to write her second novel, a quiet, ruminative and intensely focused story about the aging preacher of a small Iowa town. The book takes the form of a letter written in 1956 by John Ames to his young son, the result of a late marriage. In telling of his own moral struggles, Ames reflects on those of his father and grandfather, both preachers themselves who served in the Civil War and came away changed in vastly different ways. There is humor and humanity in this book, but in its lapidary prose, there is nothing frivolous or wasted.—Michele Orecklin
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R U N A W A Y
B y A l i c e M u n r o
At 73, Munro continues to be one of literature's most reliable miracle workers. Every few years she produces another supremely acute and confident collection of short stories. This one focuses mostly on women in her native Canada, some of them old enough to look back over a lifetime of predicaments, some of them young enough to foresee their first real dilemmas. Munro considers them all with dry-eyed compassion. —Richard Lacayo
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T H E M A S T E R
B y C o l m T ó i b í n
The master here is Henry James in his later years. But the term could just as well refer to Tóibín, the Irish author of four previous novels, who adroitly imagines his way into James famously acute and sinuous mind. Tóibín follows James from the collapse in 1895 of his hopes to find success as a playwright to the brink of that moment five years later when James embarks upon The Ambassadors, the first of the great novels of his major phase. Tóibín captures the paradox that was James, whose sexuality remained an unsettled question and whose attempts at intimacy with either sex ended in confusion and disappointment. Always ready to gain a firmer purchase on his own impressions, James as Tóibín imagines him moves through every room with all of his faculties alert and his sensibilities at the ready, all the while misreading his own needs and longings. —R.L.
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T H E H A M I L T O N C A S E
B y M i c h e l l e de K r e t s e r
That rare treasure, a perfect novel. Set in the British colony of Ceylon in the 1930s, The Hamilton Case tells the story of Sam Obeysekere, an Oxford-educated, thoroughly assimilated, supremely English Ceylonese lawyer who takes on the murder of a respectable English planter. As the plot grows darker and more complex, de Kretser's prose gleams with sinister beauty. Her sentences sparkle like precious things; you want to keep them in your pocket on the end of a watch chain. The more he tries to untangle the mystery, the more deeply tangled Sam becomes in his own loyalties and prejudices. "Time never simplifies—it unravels and complicates," de Kretser writes. "Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken."—L.G.
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N O N - F I C T I O N
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W I L L I N T H E W O R L D : H O W S H A K E S P E A R E
B E C A M E S H A K E S P E A R E
B y S t e p h e n G r e e n b l a t t
Greenblatt, a Harvard professor, is the most prominent of the "new historicists"—literary scholars who examine classic texts within the social and political milieu that produced them. But his supple, supremely readable book does much more than "historicize" Shakespeare. It fills him out in all human dimensions, taking the scanty historical record of the man's life and examining it by the blazing light of his plays and poems. The Shakespeare he gives us is a man deeply schooled in the folk culture of his native Stratford and trapped in a bad marriage that he simply ignores by moving to London. In Greenblatt's view, one increasingly popular among Shakespeare scholars, he was also in all likelihood for at least some part of his life a secret Catholic, this at a time when the old faith was being brutally suppressed by the new Protestant ascendancy. This is literary biography at its most resourceful—and delightful.—R.L. |
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B L U E B L O O D
B y E d w a r d C o n l o n
Today Conlon is a New York City detective, but in Blue Blood he tells the story of his education as a plain old street cop. Conlon went from Harvard to the South Bronx, where he busted drug operations, chased down perps, interrogated suspects and roamed the endless stairwells of ghetto housing projects, "where no one had enough so they ruined what they had, and then came looking for yours." Blue Blood is a richly entertaining peek behind the badge—it's like the first half of the best Law & Order episode ever—but it's also a love letter to the bizarre and fascinating world of street-level New York City.—L.G.
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T H E G O U R M E T C O O K B O O K
E d i t e d b y R u t h R e i c h l
A cookbook is not a shopping list: Clear, precise, engaging prose matters, and The Gourmet Cookbook has it. These 1,200 recipes, culled from 60 years of Gourmet magazine, are practical, approachable and delectable. It includes classics like Oysters Rockefeller and Lobster Newburg, but it's far from stodgy: Contemporary American cooking is spicy, lean, and cosmopolitan, and The Gourmet Cookbook keeps up with the times. (Grilled Korean-Style Steak with Spicy Cilantro Sauce, anyone?) It's also handsome: pose this stately sunflower-yellow volume on your countertop with some ingredients, and you have an instant culinary still life.—L.G.
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D R E S S Y O U R F A M I L Y I N C O R D U R O Y A N D
D E N I M
B y D a v i d S e d a r i s
This is the book Woody Allen has always wanted to write. With his fourth volume of autobiographical essays, Sedaris completes the transition from humorist to humanist, from a guy who writes hilarious recollections to a memoirist who reaches into some very deep places in himself and you. And he does it—pay attention, Woody—without losing his knack for making you laugh till it hurts. ("Six to Eight Black Men", about Christmas practices around the world, among other things, is one of the funniest things he's ever written.) Sedaris is still contending with the memory of his eccentric parents, with his trying siblings, with his sometimes exasperating but much needed boyfriend. And all the while he's also contending, hilariously, but very movingly, with himself, a man as eccentric, trying and exasperating as they come. But if the material is the same, in the best parts of this book he arrives at a new level of comic brilliance.—R.L. |
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P E R S E P O L I S 2 : T H E S T O R Y O F A R E T U R N
B y M a r j a n e S a t r a p i
Satrapi continues the story—begun in her graphic novel Persepolis—of growing up in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. In Persepolis 2 her family sends her to study in Austria, where she endures the trials of first love in the harsh surroundings of an alien culture. When she can stand life abroad no longer she returns to the oppressive atmosphere of Tehran, only to endure a different kind of challenge: parties and lipstick are forbidden, and even the models at her art school are completely veiled. Satrapi's deceptively simple black and white panels ache with tenderness and emotion, and crackle with righteous anger. Like all coming of age stories, Persepolis 2 is hilarious and heartbreaking; like very few, it is also a powerful social history of a terrifying time and place.—L.G.
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