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…

Reading Dominic Smith's new novel, Return to Valetto, is to be transported to Italy. My senses are filled with the pleasures of a foreign place and my mind is absorbed with a mystery that develops…

Witness, Jamel Brinkley's new volume of short stories, is as awe-inspiring and accomplished a collection as his first, A Lucky Man. Brinkley shares my shelf with the greats: Stuart…

I have long been a fan of Anne Enright's fiction and in her latest novel, The Wren, The Wren, the Booker prize winning Irish writer is her reliably intimate, earthy, sensual self. Told through…

In the most recent volume of the New England Review, I was stopped in my tracks by a novella by Lori Ostlund called "Just Another Family," which starts out with a great deal of humor and…

Every year I read The Pushcart Prize, one of three annual anthologies that contains a selection of writing published in magazines and journals. The Pushcart Prize combines stories, poems, and…

This novel is all voice and what a voice it is! Acerbic, irreverent, anti-everything but mostly anti-male, it is also witty, funny and very, very smart. It's the voice of a young woman who is judgmental…