Suspend Your Disbelief

Contributor Types

Lee Thomas

Editor at Large

Lee Thomas is a fiction writer. She was the Managing Editor of FWR from 2010-2013. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Charlotte Observer, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is finishing a story collection.


Articles

Reviews |

The Believers, by Zoë Heller

by Lee Thomas

In her latest novel, The Believers, Zoë Heller once again proves herself a master of the unsettling. If conflict is the seed of narrative, then Heller’s storytelling is a Black Forest of strife. Aging radicals Joel and Audrey Litvinoff live in Greenwich Village, a perch from which they still hold sway over their three adult offspring. The Litvinoffs are a messy, complicated family who face a crisis when Joel, the patriarch, suffers a stroke in the middle of a courtroom–while defending a man accused of a terrorist plot; his stroke uncovers the family’s dissatisfactions.


Reviews |

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

by Lee Thomas

What an encore. Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, offers a series of intricately timed revelations. A teenage refugee from Nigeria carries one side of the narrative, a young British professional, the other. Through this split-screen, Cleave tackles the multiple perspectives inherent in any story: someone always stands outside looking in. Perspective equals character, which makes his use of multiple names so interesting…


Reviews |

In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan

by Lee Thomas

Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.


Essays |

A Review of One's Own

by Lee Thomas

Over the past decade, book reviews and newspaper book sections have faced, and continue to face, serious danger of extinction. Lee Thomas explores what our culture stands to lose if the edited book review is in jeopardy, positing that book lovers, writers, and critics might yet find a way to profit–rather than suffer from–the sea changes of the publishing industry and online review forums.


Reviews |

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

by Lee Thomas

Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa after a twenty-year, largely silent absence, offering his family no details about those lost years or the cause of his return. Home is a quiet book, one without dramatic plot devices; Robinson’s characters carry out the pure weight of life–playing the piano, going to the store, washing dishes– all while facing the ever-present sense of life’s brevity.


Reviews |

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews

by Lee Thomas

From its beginning The Flying Troutmans evokes Tolstoy’s famous line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Troutmans take top honors for truly unique dysfunction, and Miriam Toews writes their road trip saga brilliantly; here is one hot mess of a family in a book so enchanting it’s hard to tear your eyes away.




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