The Women in Black is a favorite of Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures, the novel I discussed in my last post. Published in 1993, it was Madeleine St. John's first novel and…

As I work on my next novel, I have been thinking about the many ways a writer can keep a mystery alive through hundreds of pages. Clare Chambers' extraordinary new novel, Small Pleasures is…

I've been rereading the novels I've loved in these last few weeks as I've moved from a rural location in western New York State back to Brooklyn, and in this post I want to discuss Joan Silber's Improvement.…

After finishing All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, I turned to Sabina Murray's Valiant Gentlemen, another novel about lives impacted by World War Two written in the third…

Before Tony Doerr's new novel arrives, I wanted to reread All The Light We Cannot See, his previous novel, published in 2014. This time, I read it slowly, only a few chapters a day—ten or fifteen…

Lately, I've been reading more fiction published by small presses because, overall, those books receive less attention from reviewers and so it's often harder to know about them. I also want to occasionally…

Marisa Silver's beautiful new novel, The Mysteries, achieves something that is rare in novels these days, a redemption that is found less through action than internal deliberation. Indeed,…

Ron Nyren's The Book of Lost Light, published in 2020 by Black Lawrence Press, is about a photographer's obsessive desire to reveal the invisible data of time. It begins with what is probably…

Abigail, by the Hungarian writer, Magda Szabó, is a lighter read than her other novels. It lacks the brilliant strangeness of The Door (my favorite Szabó novel), but it is compelling…

Lately, I've been thinking about novels that have two narrative lines, one central and one peripheral. It came to my attention while I was reading Scott Spencer's, A Ship Made of Paper, a novel…