In The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka as the story follows three boys who, along with a cast of eccentrics, make their way from Colombo to England. By turns adventurous, mysterious, and wistful, the novel traces the search for belonging amidst strangers and strange lands. Charlotte Boulay considers Ondaatje’s latest beautiful offering in the context of his larger body of work.
I have a problem telling stories. Sometimes in my excitement it’s difficult to gauge how much detail a friend, or a reader, actually needs to know. Because while not all details are important to understanding the events, to me, often the details are the most interesting part. So, if I’m trying to describe how late the train was, so late that it made me miss my doctor’s appointment, instead I might end up talking more about the argument I eavesdropped on while waiting for that train, and the maroon, bedazzled pumps of the woman who was hissing at her partner. […]
Jess Row’s second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, is an examination of some of our most intense impulses, and the debates, quandaries, and mysteries in these seven stories will stay with you. Charlotte Boulay talks to Jess Row about the intersection between compassion and extremism.
Hannah Tinti was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, a place she credits with having influenced the darker side of her fiction. Charlotte Boulay talks with the much-admired author and editor about the influence of art in her work, how writers find their subject matter, her editorial approach at One Story, and trusting your gut during the drafting process, among other subjects.
I’ve come a bit late (only 14 years or so) to the wonder that is Megan Whalen Turner, author of the young adult fantasy series The Queen’s Thief. Of all the books I’ve read in recent memory, not many compare to this series, which is serial narrative of the best kind—the kind that gets richer and more complex as it develops. Before this month, there were three novels: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia. A fourth, A Conspiracy of Kings, has just been released. I can’t wait to read it.
I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I can’t talk about Kelly Link without talking about the story “Stone Animals,” which first appeared in the Best American Short Stories in 2005, and then in Magic. I still dream about it sometimes. There was a period of almost a year after I first read it when, no matter what else I was reading, I wished it was “Stone Animals.” I’ve read it a dozen times. I sort of want to be reading it right now.
a taste: I want my life to be a Kelly Link story. I mean it, even though many of the characters in her stories are a little lost, literally or emotionally, and even though others are in danger. Pretty Monsters is intended to be a young adult collection of short stories. This in itself is new—there aren’t many YA story collections, are there? But even if there are, there is nothing like Kelly Link. It’s useful that a few of the stories in Pretty Monsters are republished from her earlier collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, because I […]
E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.
In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.
The first review in FWR’s “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” series. These days there is always something for children to do–often a rather shallow electronic distraction–but Tove Jansson’s Moomin books show readers of all ages that quietly sitting and thinking by yourself is a valuable activity. Her characters let us know that almost everyone is lonely from time to time, and that while community can be an antidote to loneliness, we can also learn from solitude.
