Female friendships are not commonly found at the center of the literary novel, but this summer welcomes debut novels by two young, talented writers that place female friendships front and center in their narratives—The Girls from Corona...
Lou Marie, my grandmother, is telling this story. It is a story about before, before she was old, before she became the drawl, the accent, the presence behind the white door in her own daughter’s house, with only her hair to keep her from...
Funny Once is Nelson’s eleventh book, and while she’s shown herself to be a deft novelist, this collection highlights the reasons she’s earned a reputation as a master of the short story.
Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his...
Chang-rae Lee’s fifth novel begins in the voice of a “we” that evokes the past and discounts its significance in a single sentence. “Everyone is from someplace,” the faceless collective muses, “but that someplace, it turns out, is gone.”...
In 1956 Updike was just twenty-three years old, but he had already embarked on one of the longest dominant careers in American letters. The young Pennsylvanian, with his “towers of ambition” that “rose, crystalline, within me,” would...
