The Newlyweds, by Nell Freudenberger
by Charlotte Boulay
In Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, The Newlyweds, a Bangladeshi woman finds that the dream of a better life in America carries risks, just not the ones she expects.
In Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, The Newlyweds, a Bangladeshi woman finds that the dream of a better life in America carries risks, just not the ones she expects.
Can’t make it to Paris this spring? Don’t worry. Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel, An Unexpected Guest , delivers armchair travel fresh as a fragrant baguette.
This week’s feature is Lauren Groff‘s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, as well as in the 2007 and 2010 Best American Short Stories , Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes: In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name […]
Doomed love with a dark twist. Lush historical details elevate Ron Rash’s The Cove.
Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, gorgeously renders a commune’s rise, fall, and life-long resonance for the people who grew up within it. Unfolding as a series of snapshots, the book’s events span the birth of this late-1960s utopia and its central character, Bit Stone, to his middle age in a bleak—and imminent—dystopic future.
Michael Griffith’s latest novel captures the last twenty minutes of a man’s life: Vada finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, but this book gives good pathos, too.
The title of Jim Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, could also be a creative mantra. Here the veteran writer discusses his research process, the apocalyptic state of the world, the (possible) irrelevancy of literature to the apocalypse, his epic mustache—and other matters of importance.
1983. Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. A horrific incident that haunts the Kenney siblings for decades to come. Jennifer Taylor calls Carol Anshaw’s new novel, Carry the One, a “compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.”
Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted is made up of journal entries that recount the main character Pam’s travels, troubles, and search for meaning. In Michael Byers’s review, he wishes the novel were braver, and argues that the literary novel must take itself seriously, while considering why we hold genre fiction to a different standard.
Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.
