Lotería, by Mario Alberto Zabrano
by Sheerah Tan Cole
Lotería does not need to to build over hundreds of pages to “earn” a height of feeling.
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 […]
The best stories channel all the variety of their subject matter to the same place. They use it to worm into those mysterious depths that underlie human experience, those facets of existence we can each recognize despite the different lives we lead—connection, compassion, loyalty, betrayal, loss, failure.
The optimism and nostalgia we sometimes associate with a certain narrative of American immigration—the golden door—are banished by these writers’ sharp, sober observations.
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
“These spare pages please and engage the eye, heart, and mind, like leaves in a chapbook. Liliane’s Balcony is a small elegant book in every way. Readers will be inspired to visit Fallingwater and listen for Liliane’s voice above the falls.”
“These spare pages please and engage the eye, heart, and mind, like leaves in a chapbook. Liliane’s Balcony is a small elegant book in every way. Readers will be inspired to visit Fallingwater and listen for Liliane’s voice above the falls.”
Albena Stambolova’s short, fable-like novel Everything Happens As It Does brings a whole new sensibility to the body of English translations from her native Bulgaria’s contemporary literature.
“The real estate in North London Drabble-land has appreciated and her cast of bohemian academics has aged over the fifty years since her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963),” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reports, reviewing Dame Margaret Drabble’s newest novel, The Pure Gold Baby, “but she’s back, in fine form.”
Peter Murphy offers us a fictional review of an imaginary anthology of songs about the Rua river, which was removed from his new novel, The River and Enoch O’Reilly, at the draft stage. It publishes tomorrow!
The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
