In Vargas Llosa's Latest, Dickens Meets Soap Opera
The Discreet Hero is set in two Peruvian cities, the provincial desert town of Piura and the metropolis of Lima, and tells of two aging businessmen, each of whom we meet on the verge of life-changing...
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Book Review: 'The Discreet Hero'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript DON GONYEA, HOST: Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa has just published a new novel. It's called "The Discrete Hero," and it's...
View Article'Crescent Moon' Counts Down To Political Mayhem
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is American-educated Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto's first novel, but she already has three books to her credit: One volume of poetry, another a memoir (Songs of Blood...
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Book Review: Jo Nesbo, 'Blood On Snow'
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Book Review: 'Voices In The Night'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: There's a new collection of short stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steven Millhauser.
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Book Review: 'Skylight' By Jose Saramago
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: When the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago died in 2010, he left behind an unpublished novel. He'd...
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Book Review: 'The Convert's Song' By Sebastian Rotella
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Sebastian Rotella's thrillers can seem very realistic. Maybe that has something to do with his day job. He's a...
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The Perfect Family Book List
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: We're going to do some last-minute shopping with our book critic Alan Cheuse. Needless to say, his friends and...
View ArticleJoyce Carol Oates Wades Into Troubled Waters With 'The Sacrifice'
With great energy and a cold eye for contemporary American race relations, here comes Joyce Carol Oates with a new novel that shows off her muck-raking credentials. The Sacrifice faces squarely an...
View Article'Descent' Is A Twisty Thriller-Plus
The premise of Descent may sound pretty straight-forward: One summer morning while vacationing with her family in the foothills of the Rockies, a young girl, a high-school athlete in her senior year,...
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Book Review: 'Descent' By Tim Johnson
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: The premise of "Descent," a new novel by Tim Johnston, is a familiar one. A teenaged girl disappears; her...
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Book Review: 'Sympathy For The Devil' By Michael Mewshaw
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View Article'The Jaguar's Children' Is Ripped From Heartbreaking Headlines
In an extraordinary feat of literary ventriloquism, the widely praised Canadian nonfiction writer John Vaillant has produced a novel that seems to have leapt from the headlines.
View ArticleDelicious Short Stories, Ripe On The Vine In 'Honeydew'
Prize-winning short story writer Edith Pearlman has just come out with a new collection of short fiction, called Honeydew. And the first thing I wanted to do after finishing my initial reading of these...
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Book Review: 'The Evening Chorus'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: If you like dark and lyrical love stories, Alan Cheuse has a suggestion for you. It's a novel by the Canadian...
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Book Review: Ross Ritchell's 'The Knife'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Last year, the National Book Award went to Phil Klay, a writer who used his experience as a veteran in his...
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Book Review: 'Satin Island' By Tom McCarthy
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: Now, "Satin Island." It's the title of the new book by Tom McCarthy, the acclaimed experimental novelist.
View ArticleMontana's Almost Crowded Now, Thanks To The Colorful Characters Of 'Crow Fair'
I recall with a certain fondness a summer evening long ago at the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, when Montana resident Richard Ford opened a reading from the work of Montana writer William...
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Book Review: Rachel Kushner, 'The Strange Case Of Rachel K'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Rachel Kushner's novel, "The Flamethrowers" was one of the best and most widely praised books of 2013.
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Book Review: 'The Language Of Paradise'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: "The Language Of Paradise." That's the title of a new book by first-time novelist Barbara Klein Moss. "The...
View ArticleA Former Country Girl Catches Fire In 'The Love Object'
When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that...
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Book Review: 'The New World'
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: Two to make a marriage and two to make a novel about a marriage. Reviewer Alan Cheuse has just picked up the...
View Article'Black Snow' Is A Lyrical Landscape Of Hope And Menace
Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called Red Sky in Morning, set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a...
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Book Review: 'Lifted By The Great Nothing,' Karim Dimechkie
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: Sometimes a book grips you from the moment you read the title. That's what happened when reviewer Alan Cheuse...
View ArticleA 'Pinch' Of Magic Seasons This Half-Fantastical Neighborhood History
You may have read about an imaginary Southern piece of turf where the past presses on the present with such force that characters find themselves transformed with the pressure of it, where the...
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Book Review: 'The Black Snow,' Paul Lynch
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.Transcript AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: A lot of us have been there. You read a terrific first book from a writer and wait eagerly and nervously for...
View Article'Mazie' Pays Homage To A Real-Life Saint Of The Streets
The Mazie of Jami Attenberg's new novel is Mazie Phillips Gordon — an actual New Yorker. Though born in Boston just at the end of the 19th century, she moved to New York City at the age of 10 to live...
View Article'Meteor' Is A Fiery Ride Through American History
Only last year, New Jersey writer Norman Lock brought out The Boy in His Winter, his time-travel version of Huck and Jim's passage along a great American river, and the river of time. In his new novel,...
View Article'The Cartel' Is A True Crime Adventure With A Killer Protagonist
The dedication of Don Winslow's novel The Cartel is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or "disappeared" in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 — the period covered in this...
View Article'Aurora' Journeys In A New Direction
Veteran California science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson grounds his new novel squarely in a recognizable convention: the generation ship. In this case, it's a 26th century starship sent from...
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