New Titles From WTAW Press The Groundhog Forever, by Henry Hoke Mark this month’s celebration of pride with the queer sequel to the movie “Groundhog Day.” In Henry Hoke’s debut novel, two film students in post-9/11 Manhattan relive the same day over and over together: the day they meet Bill Murray […]
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges Anna May Wong was the first internationally acclaimed Asian American actor, with a career that spanned decades, from 1919 to 1961, and Hodges’ biography is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed account of one of early […]
The Love of A Good Woman, Stories by Alice Munro The short story has few practitioners as skilled as Alice Munro, who turns 90 this July, and who’s all but required reading during #ShortStoryMonth. Munro famously began writing stories as a young mother, finding the story took “less time.” (See […]
Ah, books. They’re not like TV shows. Your favorite characters never age; there are no contract negotiations that pull them out of the frame. The goods ones, our favorites, never change yet seem to introduce you to images you may have not noticed on your first read-through. Today the […]
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith This collection came about by accident, Zadie Smith tells us in the foreword, but the voice and curiosity that drives it makes this a seamless and satisfying read. My hope, as a reader of essays, is to learn something, whether the topic […]
SCI-FI Project Hail Mary: A Novel, by Andy Weir Author of The Martian, Weir releases his book about “Ryland Grace, the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission…” Immunity Index, by Sue Burke Burke tackles a dystopian future where the US is facing growing food shortages, stark inequality, and a growing […]
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton I knew from the start that things would go badly for Ralph Marvell. He’s a writer who spends more time thinking about writing than actually doing it: ‘You ought to write’; they had one and all said it to him from the […]
How to Grow Old Disgracefully: An Autobiography, by Hermione Gingold If you’re a fan of classic films, say, Vincente Minnelli’s 1958 musical, Gigi, or classic stagings of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, you already know Hermione Gingold, the earthy actress with the husky voice and wicked sense of irony. Otherwise, […]
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford If this novel had been published under the title the author wanted, The Saddest Story, contemporary readers might have had a difficult time locating a copy. Fortunately, Ford Madox Ford agreed to his publisher’s suggestion of The Good Soldier, and with that, the […]
The Clothing of Books, by Jhumpa Lahiri “How do you clothe a book?” is the how this small, but powerful volume begins. For a writer whose stories are as personal and complex as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, a cover’s design presents a different set of questions. The Clothing of Books began as […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.