In the opening of Bee Sacks' aptly titled story, "The Song of the Bow," two trans men watch through the window of a coffee shop in Brooklyn as two Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox men across the street talk…

James is Percival Everett's answer to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Like Huckleberry Finn, it is narrated by the eponymous character, in this case, Jim, the runaway…

Tessa Hadley's new collection of stories, After the Funeral, plumbs the depths of what we see, hear, and understand about our fellow human beings, dwelling on the private things people…

I was attracted to this novel because I had loved The Evening Chorus, Helen Humphreys's 2015 novel about a prisoner of war who maintains his sanity by observing a family of redstarts, a…

Is this it? Is this all there is? The men and women who populate Sue Mell's vital and exciting collection of stories, A New Day, are looking for the right experience and are always coming…

Leaving by Roxana Robinson is a novel about a marriage and the habituated assumptions made by its long term, well-off partners, Warren and Janet. When Warren falls in love with a woman…

I've now read two of Helen Garner's novels, The Spare Room, from 2008, her most recent, which I wrote about in my blog on 4/21/2024 and The Children's Bach, a 1984 novel republished…

How do you write about love? Anne Michaels, in her startlingly original and evocative novel, Held, does it by zooming in to a moment of intense and heightened awareness in the lives of six…

A friend, whose opinion I trust, raved about a novel she had just read called, The Children's Bach, by Helen Garner. My bookstore didn't have a copy available, so while I waited, I read Garner's…

It's hard to put down Margot Livesey's riveting new novel, The Road from Belhaven, because the troubles of the protagonist, Lizzie Craig, which are the enduring troubles of young women, are…