Mannequin Girl, by Ellen Litman
by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman’s second novel, is a coming-of-age story and a family drama set in a Moscow boarding school for children with scoliosis.
Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman’s second novel, is a coming-of-age story and a family drama set in a Moscow boarding school for children with scoliosis.
I’ve always been interested in family and the idea of family and the families we make for ourselves. Family is composed of the people you love most. Therefore, they’re the people most likely to hurt you. I’m interested, then, in how we hurt each other, often without meaning to, just by what we want.
Today is a very special day indeed: the relaunch of FWR 2.0! We are excited to introduce these new features:
“On a strip of paper on my kitchen wall are the words “Thinking is for morons.” I’m much more prone to that way of being in the world, both on and off the page.”
There are images from Kyle Minor’s stories that will stick with me to the grave: a man laying hands on a dying man’s tumor, a preacher baking biscuits at a boy’s funeral. These images sear because they get at the gruesome failures of life. The preacher bakes biscuits in a gimmicky bid for consolation. There seems no true feeling in his action, and so it falls far short of the gravity of the moment. The man with the tumor thinks the narrator of “Seven Stories about Sebastian of Koulev-Ville” is the healer come to pray over him. The narrator has […]
In its most poignant passages, A Life in Men unpacks the tired clichés about living life to the fullest.
“Even when I walked away from the novel for years at a time, I knew I had something, and I knew I’d want to return to it. I needed it to be right, and I needed closure.”
Lotería does not need to to build over hundreds of pages to “earn” a height of feeling.
Lots of novels that call themselves funny turn out to be playful or witty or perhaps casually clever in a quiet way. But Drew Perry’s Kids These Days (Algonquin) is a genuinely funny book. One that will make you guffaw into your gingerbread latte until a stranger at the next table asks, “What’s so funny?” At which point you might—as I did—end up reading pages aloud and making a scene at Starbucks. If you want a novel that serves up its humor in a venti-sized cup, this one’s for you. Part of what’s funny is the premise: Walter and Alice […]
Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), was an Indie Next Pick for May 2013. Carolyn See, in the Washington Post, called it “mysterious, exotic, creepy—everything ignorant foreigners used to believe China to be.” And in his blurb, Robert Olen Butler hailed the novel as “a major book by a splendid writer.” River of Dust is a gripping historical adventure, set in rural China in 1910, which opens with a parent’s worst fear: kidnapping. The book is also a lyrical psychological and spiritual meditation, as the search for the American missionary couple’s stolen son becomes nothing less than a search for “the […]
