Ever wonder how someone could wake up every morning next to George W. Bush and think, “Hey, I love that guy!”? Yeah, me too. Which is exactly why I couldn’t wait to read American Wife, in which Curtis Sittenfeld imagines the life of Laura Bush.
In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.
This beautiful novel by one of my favorite short-story writers follows the adventures of 22-year-old Lillian Leyb, a recent survivor of a Russian pogrom, from New York’s Lower East Side to Seattle to the remotest parts of Alaska, where she hopes to get a boat to Siberia. (The story is set in the 1920s.) After her husband and parents were murdered before her eyes and her small daughter lost in the fray (and sought for some time), Lillian emmigrated, hoping to escape her haunted past and carve out a life for herself in New York. But just as Lillian’s getting […]
