A finalist for the National Book Award, Julie Otsuka’s innovative novel The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story’s mail-order-brides.
Little jaunt to the underworld? Don’t forget your passport. The second installment in Lev Grossman’s Fillory series, The Magician King, continues to play with realist fantasy and the right amount of irony to meld the two. Quentin and his pals provide a sly and subversive fairy tale for grown-ups, with a caution: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
Ever feel like reading genre without, you know, knowing what to expect? Cam Terwilliger on why Percival Everett’s Assumption—one volume, three mystery novellas—will kick your [ahem] assumptions to the curb.
Popular Argentinian writer Eduardo Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read.” In this review of The Secret in Their Eyes, Denise Delgado explores the similarities and differences between Sacheri’s first novel and the Academy-Award winning film adaptation he helped write.
In his powerful debut novel, The Art of Fielding, N+1 co-founder/editor Chad Harbach taps into the ephemeral baseball consciousness through a four-person starting rotation of narrators—all characters at a small, fictional, liberal arts school on Lake Michigan.
Does the lowly individual stand a chance against the blunt force of the mass? Anita Desai’s novella collection, The Artist of Disappearance, celebrates the wish to be left alone, and the raw agony of the desire to be seen.
Published last month by Starcherone Books, Sarah Falkner’s debut novel is the winner of their seventh annual Prize for Innovative Fiction. Contributor Laura Valeri says this of the book: “Even beyond the novel’s halfway point, the reader may still be uncertain of the story’s protagonists or the animal sanctuary’s role. But the pages keep turning because of Falkner’s incisive prose, her accurate and fluid discussion of the aesthetic values of film, and the moral complexity of her characters.”
In his novel Animals, we follow Don LePan’s characters into a not-too-distant future, where human beings with birth defects are slaughtered as edible products. Readers’ sense of injustice will be roused by LePan’s descriptions of suffering in the feedlots–but can a novel inspire us to stop eating factory-farmed meat? Laura Roberts hopes it can.
In this wide-ranging review, Brad Wetherell looks at Tom Franklin’s newest novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and considers the way Franklin subverts genre expectations, as well as how e-readers like the Kindle have the potential to change readers’ expectations.
A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?
