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, […]
There There: A novel, by Tommy Orange Brilliant. Innovative. Lyric. Tommy Orange’s stunning fiction debut is all those things, but trying to describe this eclectic, personal novel doesn’t do it justice. Called “groundbreaking, extraordinary,” by The New York Times, and garnering praise from People Magazine to Entertainment Weekly, and awarded […]
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith This collection of essays came about by accident, Zadie Smith tells us in the foreword, but the voice and curiosity behind it make this read seamless and satisfying. And with Smith, whether the subject is Nabokov or Forster, her person is an […]
Current WTAW Press Titles WTAW Press has two great 2019 titles, Chimerica, the debut novel from Anita Fellicelli, and Like Water and Other Stories, the English-language debut of Olga Zilberbourg. And both are available as Ebooks. In Chimerica, by Anita Felicelli (Love Songs of a Lost Continent), down-on-her-luck Tamil American […]
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer Less, the sixth book and fifth novel by Andrew Sean Greer, is a jewel-box of a novel—compact, sparkling, and filled with treasures. Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Greer’s novel is an effortless read, though that’s not to say that the story—and its […]
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, essays by Michael Chabon There are some great memoirs about fathers. Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland, Will Boast’s Epilogue come to mind, and Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father—narratives in which fathers run the spectrum, from brave to flawed […]
Thunderstruck & Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken Early on in Elizabeth McCracken’s extraordinary story collection, Thunderstruck, a grieving mother instructs her seventeen-year-old son to seal up the room of his dead sister. This, she imagines will somehow purge the house of the evil that caused her daughter’s lymphoma. “Don’t touch […]
Car Trouble by Robert Rorke As Car Trouble opens, it’s one a.m., and the novel’s young protagonist, Nicky Flynn, is driving backwards through the streets of Brooklyn in a Chevy Impala. The car, nicknamed the Blue Max, operates only in reverse, due to a jammed gearshift, and belongs to his […]
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron In 1979, John Gardner wrote in his review of Sophie’s Choice, “guilt is everywhere,” a jolt in an otherwise positive review. He called the book a “splendidly written, thrilling, philosophical novel on the most important subject of the 20th century.” The assertion must have seemed […]
Middlemarch, by George Eliot The first thing I knew about Middlemarch, George Eliot’s classic novel, was the ending. The year after the BBC’s series based on the book appeared, it came to public television in the States, and one evening, I caught the final scene. I’d seen none of the […]
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.