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February 2014 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
FEBRUARY FEATURES: Poetry of The First World War: An Anthology, edited by Tim Kendall, Oxford University Press. (UK) 232 pgs. Painting The Egret’s Echo by Patty Dickson Pieczka. Bitter Oleander Press. 81pgs. The Earth Avails by Mark Wunderlich. Graywolf Press. 67 pgs. The Antigone Poems. Poems by Marie Slaight, Drawings…
Books Alive! Presents: David Maraniss
The keynote luncheon speaker at this year’s Books Alive! conference, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Maraniss is a critically acclaimed author and longtime writer and editor at the Washington Post. His bestsellers include Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero” target=“_blank”>Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero;…
Alan Cheuse: Because I write and read all day, I try to reserve pride of place on my nightstand for books I hope will entertain me before I ease off into sleep. Not that I don’t take these books seriously, but they’re mostly genre books that I don’t have to…
It’s hard to go through a graduate writing program and not leave with a disdain for popular genre fiction. Part of that disdain is deserved: There’s a lot of bad shit on the bestseller lists. And invariably, most students have a professor who hates writers like John Grisham and Danielle…
The Top 10 Book-to-Film Adaptations
Catching up on this year’s Oscar nominees brings to mind great movies of the past that remain faithful to the books they’re based on. While several of this year’s Oscar picks are based on books, one can be fairly certain the makers of “Captain Phillips” or “The Wolf of Wall…
Books Alive! Presents: Laura Lippman
Award-winning crime novelist Laura Lippman spent two decades as a reporter, many of those years with the Baltimore Sun. Along with her acclaimed Tess Monaghan series, Lippman’s bestsellers include What the Dead Know” target=“_blank”>What the Dead Know,
The Allure of Historical Fiction
What do Half-Blood Blues” target=“_blank”>Half Blood Blues, and
The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
An Online Symposium on The Anatomy of Violence
Foreword: The Monsters are in the Molecules By Ronald K.L. Collins Dr. Adrian Raine’s The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime (Pantheon, 2013) is the ideal kind of book for our first venture into the realm of extended discussion. Though we reviewed it last May, we thought it…
Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II
Having lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy half a century ago — a defining moment for America, especially so for those few of us remaining survivors who were part of his administration — its meaning remains a fixation about which honest commentators and historians differ. The recent…
Who killed whom? Who’s not only on first these days; it has knocked whom out of the park. The mad batter segues from “Who do you think you are?” to “Who do you think you’re talking to?” with nary a change of case, concluding with a preposition. It was Winston…
An Exemplars Special: E.E. Cummings, A Life
What is the shelf life of E.E. Cummings? Apparently, there’s no expiration date, as each generation falls in love with the nimble magician again and again. Susan Cheever sets up her goal to uncover the popularity of a complicated genius in a tightly constructed biography that contributes significantly to the…
Interview with Madison Smartt Bell
Madison Smartt Bell, who has been a finalist for the National Book Award, has been known to take out a percussion instrument from Haiti and sing a native song at the end of a public reading. Though deeply immersed in the culture of that troubled country, Smartt was born near…
Pasted above my computer desk is a quote attributed to Eugène Ionesco, the renowned Romanian-born playwright: “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” Although much of what Ionesco wrote and said must be taken with a grain of salt…
Eric Nuzum:Two books have been filling my head lately; both are worth sharing:The Road (Random House Movie Tie-In Books)” target=“_blank”>The Road, but the writing is fresh and the characters are amazing. I was well into this book before I was even aware that it’s a YA title. That didn’t affect…
Some anniversaries deserve to be honored on more than a single day a year. One of them is the fiftieth anniversary of A.J. Liebling’s death. He died on 28 December 1963, but very much alive are the creations of his remarkable skill as a journalist-author with offbeat interests and the…
Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home
10 Enduring Fictional Characters
Milly Theale (To Kill a Mockingbird” target=“_blank”>To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee). Rolling herself down the road in an old tire, and from stock like Atticus, Scout Finch is as good as it gets. We’d like to be there for her when she’s older, walking down the aisle, sitting…
You’re in a bookstore, just browsing. You scan the shelves and your hands land on a book. It’s perfect. You know it’ll be on your nightstand soon.But.Did you notice the author’s gender? And did it factor into your decision to pick up the title in the first place?Hopefully not, although…
Mandibles – Kristi McLeanWar and Not War – Mike MorganThe Lord of the Bling – Craig SmithHubris and Prejudice – Christy SmithFifty Shades of Off-White – Caroline BockThe Catcher in the Spelt – Holly Smith Have your own title that falls a wee bit flat? Share it in the comments…
January 2014 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
JANUARY EXEMPLARS 2014 A Monthly Poetry Column Reviews by Grace Cavalieri featuring: Eldest Daughter by Ava Leavell Haymon. LSU Press. 80 pgs. Lines Of Defense by Stephen Dunn. W.W. Norton & Co. 95 pgs. Under The Potato Moon, Poems by Tom Kirlin; Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture by Nancy Frankel. Little Red…
America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
A recent New Yorker article on bestselling author Jennifer Weiner brought up two interesting questions. Is there sexism in literary culture (what Weiner cleverly calls Franzenfreude: “taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen”)? And what, exactly, makes a novel literary? In answer to the…
6 Books Similar to “The Princess Bride”
Whether you’ve seen it three dozen times or (gasp) just once, chances are you liked “The Princess Bride.” Or at least got a kick out of the brilliant Mandy Patinkin’s character: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” (We decline to consider cases where you’ve…
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again)
2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards Nominees
BEST NOVEL Sandrine’s Case by Thomas H. Cook (Grove Atlantic – The Mysterious Press)The Humans by Matt Haig (Simon & Schuster)Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny (Minotaur Books)Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin (Hachette Book…
Introduction from Jeremy Leaming: As editor of a legal blog that includes a feature on new books about the law, I have the opportunity to see many publications that address constitutional concerns, personalities who have had a profound impact on American law and democracy, legal and policy battles, and related…
Pinkerton’s Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland
When hundreds of avid book fans crammed into the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue one evening in October, it wasn’t to see Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins or First Lady Michelle Obama touting a new gardening book. No, the sold-out event, co-sponsored by Politics and Prose, was for chef and…
Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt
National Book Critics Circle Announces 2013 Award Nominees
FICTIONChimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Infatuations” target=“_blank”>The Infatuations, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf)Ruth Ozeki, Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice” target=“_blank”>Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice (Norton)Sheri Fink, The Unwinding: An Inner History of…
After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and…
National Book Festival to Move Indoors
After a dozen years of setting up on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the National Book Festival is moving indoors to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.The National Park Service raised concerns over pedestrian damage to the Mall after 2013’s event – which drew more than 200,000 visitors –…
Kate DiCamillo Becomes National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature
Today, bestselling author Kate DiCamillo will be inaugurated as the fourth national ambassador for young people’s literature during a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.The position was created by the Children’s Book Council (CBC) in 2008 to promote reading among kids in the face of competition from…
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: An Appreciation
The collapse of the Roman Empire was a major calamity of Western civilization. Why the Roman world of surpassing organization succumbed to unlettered tribes and its cities of extraordinary temples, palaces, and aqueducts devolved to the decrepit homes of goat herders and bandits has been a question for centuries. Stimulated…
My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
When Secretary of State John Kerry began his diplomatic work, no doubt he approached it with the high-minded, can-do style of his American predecessors. We have to do something fair and rational in the Middle East, he must have thought as he began his energetic and well-meant efforts. I hope…
The Death of Quality Book Reviews? Hardly!
Is the literary universe rudderless? According to a recent op-ed in the New York Times, it sure seems that way. Plagued by the usual suspects – decreasing readership, risk-averse (and resource-depleted) publishers, a glut of celebrity-driven titles, etc. – the world of books feels more fragile than ever. And its…
Interview with Selby Fleming McPhee
Selby Fleming McPhee’s Love Crazy, a memoir of her parents’ love and life together, is a charming book. It might just be that her father’s charm, a man whom everybody liked, is still at work so many years later, when his daughter finds the hidden box of her parents’ letters…
Interview with Joe Cipriano and Ann Cipriano
The people whose voices you hear saying, “Monday on CBS,” “Tonight on an all-new ‘Simpsons,’” or making dramatic pronouncements on movie trailers, often make lot of money for just saying a few words. How do they get to do that? Joe Cipriano is one of those voiceover actors, and Living…
Our New Year’s Reading Resolutions
Alice Padwe: I am looking to have the discipline to tear myself away from fiction and finish some of the history books on my shelf: Scullard’s From the Gracchi to Nero, Barker’s Agincourt, Ackroyd’s Thames, and Ascherson’s Black Sea.Carrie Callaghan: I’m excited to read Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, Zadie Smith’s…
Just in time for the post-gift-giving season, I’m ‘boutta go all old media on you with a list of the Worst Books of 2013. There is nothing scientific about these end-of-the-year lists. I reviewed 10 books for the Independent in 2013, and my list is culled from that tiny pool.…
My grandfather, American author John Dos Passos, begins his memoir, The Best Times (1966), with a remembrance of his father, eminent New York City attorney and second-generation Portuguese immigrant John Randolph Dos Passos. In his elder years, the son finds the father’s letters on the mantel. “Time and again I…
David Everett:Of the three piles, these are topmost amid the reading lights, device chargers, and the battered plastic case protecting that damnable orthodontic retainer (how long can those things live?): Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Alfred A. Knopf). I have never read this 2005 short novel.…
Interview with Publisher Ken Ackerman
In case you never had a grandmother who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s and told you stories about the olden days at her kitchen table, or in case you’d just like to hear those stories again, read Rachel Farber’s slim memoir Horse Radish, compiled by her daughter…
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel
Did you ever notice that when authors are interviewed, they are always asked what they’re reading? In a recent New York Times interview, Michael Connelly, the terrific thriller and mystery writer, listed some of his favorite books: Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy…
Museum of Science Fiction Coming to Washington, DC
Along with such mainstays as the National Archives and the Hirshhorn, DC residents will—by late 2014, if everything goes as planned—have another unique museum to call their own: the Museum of Science Fiction.The goal is to create the “world’s first comprehensive science fiction museum, covering the history of the genre…
I don’t know when I discovered reading but wish I did. Imagine remembering the details of the moment you met the thing that would give you thousands of hours of pleasure your whole life long? My earliest memory is of sneaking into the back bedroom of my grandparents’ house with…
12 Days of Short Stories for the Holidays
From the craziness of gift-buying to the frantic planning of the perfect New Year’s Eve, the holidays are exhausting. So decompress with the literary gift of brevity—the short story. When you’ve had too much eggnog to digest the latest from Thomas Pynchon or Donna Tartt, soothe your addled attention span…
An Interview with Sophy Burnham
An intuitive and psychic, she has written novels, children’s books, young-adult fiction, multiple magazine articles, and award-winning plays. Three of her books have appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. Active in the Washington, DC, theater community, Burnham worked at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with Broadway…
New Program Offers Free Houses to Writers
Good news, writers! If you’re willing to move to Detroit—or already live there—you’re eligible to enter the new Write A House contest. The prize? A free house.And fear not: The fine print isn’t as scary as you’d think.To apply, writers must submit a three-page writing sample, a résumé, and a…
The Guardian’s Great American Novelist Tournament Continues
In the last two days, The Guardian’s books section has picked up the pace of its slowly unfolding Great American Novelist Tournament. Beginning last July with 32 finalists, more knockout matches have taken place this week, starting with Saul Bellow’s Herzog vs. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and yesterday’s matchup…
The Birthday Queen Audrey and Don Wood Scholastic Press Recommended for ages 4-8 This new book by the beloved husband and wife team of Audrey and Don Wood tells the story of all that the Birthday Queen does to prepare for your birthday. There are clowns to audition, cakes to…
The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme
When Halperin and Heilemann wrote their best-selling Game Change, the story of the first Obama campaign for president, I wondered why anyone would want to read a book about that two year-long political saga. Hadn’t we all obsessed through the prolonged primaries between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then…
1. “Good God!—people don’t do such things.” 2. “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” 3. “He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.” 4. “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”5. “Come, children, let us shut…
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York
December 2013 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews By Grace Cavalieri
DECEMBER EXEMPLARS 2013 Monthly Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri May all our holidays be filled with books. EXEMPLARSBecause I Am The Shore I Want To Be The Sea by Renee Ashley. Subito Press. 57 pgs. New and Selected Poems by David Lehman.Scribner. 298 pgs. Shadow Play by Jody Bolz. Turning…
10 Writers You Should Be Following on Twitter
Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself). With close to 2 million followers, Gaiman is among the most popular authors on Twitter. He understands how the platform works, and he responds to (and retweets) a huge amount of his fans.John Green (@realjohngreen). This YA superstar is close behind Gaiman in popularity, with 1.8 million…
Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain
Q&A with Robert Boswell Tumbledown begins with Robert Boswell describing nameless “states of being, anonymous human conditions that thrive on the periphery and encircle us like bedroom communities.” Every one of us has to find a way to accommodate the world we live in, with its surprises, failures, inexplicable and…
Sometimes the setting of a novel can become a character in its own right. The author manages to create a sense of place so palpable that the reader is transported from his or her armchair to an arroyo in New Mexico or the barren, snow-covered landscape of a dark Lake…
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
17 Most Popular Books Found on U.S. History Lovers’ Bookshelves
Some of the Independent’s staffers informally polled history-loving friends and colleagues about their favorite titles. Here are the 17 books most likely to line those history buffs’ home shelves.Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking Adult, 2005).1776 by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2005).American Sphinx:…
Rejected Titles - December 2013
White BicuspidRachael Guadagni The Kite Jogger Josh Trapani Extremely Loud & Incredibly Proximal Holly Smith The Prevaricators’ Club D.L. Parsell 1,200 Months of Solitude Holly Smith Have your own title that doesn’t quite do it? Share it in the comments section below, tweet it to @WIRoBooks, or post it on…
The 2013 Washington Independent Review of Books Holiday Gift Guide
Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton. Based on the popular Tumblr blog of the same name, Stanton covers miles of urban streets to find the storied humans who inhabit them. His new book, featuring the best of the blog, is a glorious slice of colorful New York City. A…
Interview with Jonathan Santlofer
Q&A with Jonathan Santlofer, author of Inherit the Dead Inherit the Dead is a classic noir tale including a beautiful and clever damsel in distress, and her cast of interested parties including a drunken father, jealous best friend, two paramours, a nanny and Private Investigator Pericles Christo, who gets a…
7 Best Boxing Books Since 2000
Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier by Mark Kram (2002). An artfully written, fresh perspective on heavyweight boxing’s greatest rivalry, Ghosts of Manila centers on the third fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier (1975’s “Thrilla in Manila”) and the resulting costs—physical, mental,…
Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century
I never thought I’d say this, but I dearly miss our local Borders bookstore.To be honest, I treated it badly while it was there. If I had the time, I’d drive the 20 minutes to Politics & Prose rather than walk the four blocks from my house to Borders. But…
Read our review of Russell Banks’ A Permanent Member of the Family The Q&A with Russell Banks Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Russell Banks is one of contemporary literature’s most revered writers. His works include Affliction (made into a movie with Nick Nolte that featured an Academy…
This sarcastic take-down of BuzzFeed’s decision not to post negative reviews (another reaction from The New Yorker here) got me thinking about the uses and abuses of negative book reviews. Readers will know that we do not shy away from posting negative reviews. The editors do not stymie criticism; however,…
In Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, Peter Orner zeroes in on the strange ways our memories define us: A woman’s husband dies before their divorce is finalized; a man runs for governor of Illinois and loses much more than an election; two brothers play beneath the infamous bridge at…
In honor of the movie adaptation of The Book Thief, here are six other great books about books: The King’s English by Betsy Burton. Burton knows book-selling, and she’s the queen of making book lists. Her many lists throughout the book—among them, “25 Novels That Stood the Test of Time…
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
5 Ways to Help Your Book Market Itself
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” – Gandalf, The Fellowship of the RingAs a full-time computer consultant who is in no position to quit my day job, Gandalf’s words ring true. I must balance my time between things that pay…
Most people who were alive when President Kennedy was killed on November 22,1963 remember vividly where they were that traumatic day. The world was stunned and television repeated the event and the later shooting of Oswald in custody – over and over again. I was an assistant to Robert F.…
Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything
Recommended Books for Tweens and Teens: November 2013
Serafina’s Promise Ann E. BurgScholastic Press 304 pp. Recommended for ages 10 and up Reviewed by Beth Bayley Serafina’s Promise is a book that is at once small and impressive, like Serafina herself. It’s a “novel in verse,” a book-length poem about a young Haitian girl and her life outside…
Man Alive! by Mary Kay Zuravleff: Lightning strikes. Barbecuing ensues. —Cathy Alter The Bible: You will end badly. —Erin Elliott Oregon Hill by Howard Owen: Aging reporter solves whodunnit. —Donya CurrieFifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James: Yeah, women are freaky. —Dan HerbertThe Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher…
The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less
3 Terrific YA Dystopian Series
“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” debuts today, and there’s a good chance it’ll shatter box-office records. And in March 2014, “Divergent” will hit the silver screen with almost as much fanfare. What do these films have in common? They’re both based on wildly successful young-adult (YA) dystopian novels. If you’ve…
White Bicuspid – Rachael GuadagniThe Kite Jogger – Josh TrapaniExtremely Loud & Incredibly Proximal – Holly SmithThe Prevaricators’ Club – D.L. Parsell1,200 Months of Solitude – Holly SmithHave your own title that doesn’t quite do it? Share it in the comments section below, tweet it to @WIRoBooks, or post it…
What do literary types have queued up on their nightstands and ready to read before bed? We asked a few of them, and here’s what they said.Cathy Alter:The Wonder Bread Summer by Jessica Anya Blau (Harper Perennial). No one captures 1980s girlhood better than Blau. The premise of her latest…
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president for less than one term, but more books have been written (along with documentaries and movies) about him, his wife, his father, his brothers, his family, his lovers, than any other president in U.S. history except for Abraham Lincoln. (One estimate – 40,000.) And not…
Read our review of Dark Lies The Island here. Kevin Barry is reading at the Warehouse Theatre today (Wednesday, November 20, 2013) at 7:00pm.From Across the Rooftops to Wifey Redux, A Cruelty and of course, Dark Lies the Island, Kevin Barry is a prize winning story teller. This is his…
The Q&A with Bill Loehfelm In the last days of her training to become a full-fledged member of the New Orleans Police Department, Officer Maureen Coughlin, responding to a routine domestic violence call, stumbles into a situation she hadn’t anticipated and doesn’t entirely understand. When the officers discover a stash…
The 2013 National Book Award winners will be announced this Wednesday, November 20. Last year I put up a list of finalists with some predictions ... none of which proved correct. So this year I will skip the guessing and just provide a preview of the nominees along with some…
Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
November 2013 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
NOVEMBER EXEMPLARS 2013 Monthly Poetry Reviews By Grace Cavalieri In the month of thanks, I am thankful in finding cause for happiness and sadness as seen through poets and poetry. Stealing Sugar from the Castle, Selected and New Poems (1950-2013) by Robert Bly. W.W. Norton. 364 pages. My Poems Won’t…
Like all authors, I am often asked where I get the plots for my novels. When particularly cranky, I am tempted to say that, like everyone else, I steal them from the Greeks (or maybe a Roman or two). That is to say, there is really nothing new under the…
When Tess Gerritsen was still writing medical thrillers, she asked a librarian what kind of crime novels would appeal most to women, who buy and read more fiction than men do.Books with female victims,the librarian replied. Women readers want to personally identify with the victims. That advice is borne out…
Pride, shame, guilt, and love, the feelings that combat indelibly etches on the soul, dominate books by and about veterans. The soul damage of war from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is the same, eerie in their redundancy. No man returns from combat unscathed; we are changed forever; and we suffer…
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye
About The Smart One The Smart One by Jennifer Close centers on the “boomerang children” of the Coffey family. Martha, 30, flamed out of her nursing career, and is now working at J. Crew and living at home; Claire, 29, moves back when she breaks up with her fiancé and…
What I Learned at the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival
For one thing, even in the rain, folks came out, ran from tent to tent to hear writers speak and stood in long lines with loads of books for their favorite authors to sign. In fact, one gentleman who insisted that I use his name (Bobby Martin) had 45 books…
The 5 Most Popular Posts of October
October. The spooky season of ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night ... but who in this town needs vampires and werewolves when we’ve got the shutdown, the debt ceiling, sequestration, and the suicide caucus? The federal government might not be able to get anything done, but…
The Lincoln Deception, by the Independent’s president, David O. Stewart, is another in a long line of books whose plots turn history on its ear. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen who lent her name to an age that saw a flowering of literature and culture in England, was really a…
Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics
Interview with Antoine Laurain
About The President’s Hat The President’s Hat by Antoine Laurain is the author’s fourth novel, originally published in France as Le Chapeau de Mitterrand to critical acclaim and awarded the Prix Landerneau Découvertes and Prix Relay des Voyageurs 2013. It is being adapted for television and published this month in…
1) Assassination by defibrillator: Dick Cheney feared it while he was Vice President, and evidently had the wireless features of his implanted defibrillator disabled. For all of you with implanted defibrillators and similar fears, the New York Times has a lengthy piece on the details. I’m trying to imagine the…
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple Where’d you go, Bernadette? - Susana Olague Trapani John Adams by David McCullough All in, glorious bastard. - Rachael Guadagni A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Death in the rain. - Craig Smith The Shadow over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft Innsmouth:…
Mystery Loves Company - October 2013
Murder in Thrall by Anne Cleeland Kensington Books 288 pp. July 30, 2013 Looking for an author to replace Elizabeth George? I have a very likely candidate. Murder in Thrall is a debut British police procedural with all the bells and whistles I have been looking for. It features two…
After patiently listening to my lamentations on the unpublished state of a novel that I finished more than a year ago, many well-meaning friends advise me to get an MFA. People, I KNOW how to write. Presidents, provosts, and university boards have been rubbing their hands and licking their lips…
October 2013 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
October is the month of my birth, my marriage, my 4 children; and now— through death— I am no longer a wife but I enter October as Mother and Writer, and with these books, as friend. Failure and I Bury The Body by Sasha West. HarperPerennial.108 pgs. 3Sections by Vijay…
Interview with George Estreich
About The Shape of the Eye When Laura Estreich is born, her eyes present a puzzle. Does their shape indicate Down syndrome, or simply the fact that she has a Japanese grandmother? In this powerful memoir, poet and stay-at-home dad George Estreich reflects on his daughter’s inheritance — from the…
The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption By Laurence Leamer
One of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s pet causes is to change the process for becoming a state judge. Rather than elections which can be fraught with problems, Justice O’Connor suggests a “local non-partisan selection committee” which would vet and provide to executive officials a pool of qualified…
Photo Credit: Washington Post About Thank You for Your Service Finkel, awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship for excellence in reporting, spares neither the reader nor the soldiers and their wives and children in recounting the soldiers’ harrowing struggle to resume the roles of neighbor, husband, and father.…
Video Interview With the Owners of Literati Bookstore
Note from Josh:Susana and I were in Ann Arbor in late August and wanted to visit the city’s new independent bookstore, Literati Bookstore. The owners graciously agreed to sit down for an interview with Susana. (I acted as the cameraman and later the video editor, for what it’s worth.) We…
Moby-Richard The Grapes of Ire The Old Curiosity Bodega Portnoy’s Gripe Talk, Memory Let Us Now Praise Famous Guys Have your own title that doesn’t quite do it? Share it in the comments section below, tweet it to @WIRoBooks, or post it on our Facebook page. It may appear in…
Thor Heyerdahl’s classic pays homage to the explorer in us all. “Kon-Tiki” is a great antidote to “Iron Man 3.” The 2012 film version of Thor Heyerdahl’s classic account of crossing the Pacific in a balsa raft is a real adventure. Today’s “Action & Adventure” genre consists almost exclusively of…
Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood In An Age of Uncertainty
Interview with Daniel Chamovitz
I get the impression there is an ulterior motive here. If we think plants are sentient like us, maybe we’ll believe they’re just as important? (I already agree.) I don’t think that “ plants are sentient like us,” but I do think they are just as important. Importance does not…
It sure changed me. It taught me that reading time is precious. And the hours I spent plodding through this “quintessential” novel? Yeah, I won’t be getting those back. What’d been hyped as a transformative story about a young man finding his way in post-World War II America turned out…
Frank McCourt, for example, was not able to write his brilliant memoir Angela’s Ashes until his mother had passed away. He knew he would have to write about her affair with her cousin, and he knew he couldn’t write about that as long as she was alive. Waiting until those…
12 Best Quotes from Tom Clancy Books
Tom Clancy, renowned author of espionage thrillers, died yesterday. His books, as well as the movies based upon them and starring actors like Sean Connery and Harrison Ford, defined the genre. Here are some memorable quotes from his work: 1) The Hunt for Red October (1984) “It was one thing…
Proust and the book club enjoy the olfactory after-effects of asparagus. Photo Credit: Mercedes Mill Welcome to the inaugural meeting of Fear No Book: Club of One. I can see that I am all here. In honor of the 100th anniversary of its publication, the reading assignment was Swann’s Way,…
A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler
The Independent’s Top 5 September Posts
Welcome to October. The federal government may be shut down, but not us here at the Independent. We posted reviews of 28 books in September, as well as 22 other book related features. 50 posts in 30 days! We also introduced three new bloggers—Alice Stephens, Darrell Delamaide, and Larry DeMaria—and…
About The Abomination Three unlikely heroes work the tides and alleyways of Venice to understand the mystery that binds together virtual reality, sex trafficking, political corruption, the Catholic Church’s “abomination” of women priests, the Mafia, the Bosnian war and some unsavory truths about U.S. foreign policy. The Q&A with Jonathan…
Hey MacArthur Fellowship Committee
Dear MacArthur Committee, Well, you did it again. You chose an amazing group of people for your “genius” awards: pioneers in fields from literature to theater to economics to paleobotany. So nice to see those on the cutting edge recognized. These folks get $625,000 over five years to do with…
15 Popular Books from 30 Years Ago
1. Ironweed, William Kennedy Received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, third in Kennedy’s Albany cycle. 2. Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer Set in ancient Egypt, journeys by the dead, sex and violence (rumor has it Orhan Pamuk plagiarized quite a lot of it in his book, My Name is Red) 3. The…
Recommended Books for Tweens and Teens: September 2013
Imperfect Spiral Debbie Levy Bloomsbury352 pp. Recommended for ages 12 and up Reviewed by Lisa Smilan In her debut YA novel, Imperfect Spiral, Potomac, Md. author Debbie Levy shares a story of friendship between a 14-year-old girl and the five-year-old boy she babysat.Danielle Snyder is a regular girl with ordinary…
As not enough of the world knows, I write thrillers in which I kill reams of people in all sorts of ways: guns, knives, ice picks, frog poison, garroting, jellyfish, hagfish, falls from buildings, decapitations. It’s easy. I just think of an editor or publisher who has rejected one of…
September 2013 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
EXEMPLARS Go Giants by Nick Laird. W.W. Norton & Co.69 pgs. Birth Marks: Poems by Jim Daniels. Boa Editions LTD. 104 pgs. Plus BEST BOOKS FOR SEPTEMBER READING Playing Bach in the D.C. Metro: Poems by David Lee Garrison. Browser Books Publishing. 59pgs. Life Work: Poems by Charlotte Mandel. David…
The Iliad by Homer Achilles and Agamemnon duke it out during the Trojan War, and blood-soaked hijinks ensue. This ancient Greek epic poem is written in dactylic hexameter, the symptoms of which include a red, scaly rash. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Inscrutable social mores, lush country estates, and…
The Top 10 Historical Fiction Authors
A 2012 survey of more than 800 readers revealed the top 10 historical fiction authors. Who are these writers? What makes their craft stand out? What sets them apart? For the most part, they base their stories in long ago periods, writing about well-known historical figures either in a central…
The Third Man: One Story—Two Works of Art
I always thought of “The Third Man” as one of the classics of cinema. The 1949 movie, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, is a dramatic and atmospheric film noir set in postwar Vienna and one of my all-time favorites. The screenplay was written by…
About All the Dead Yale Men All the Dead Yale Men begins, “The odd thing is that when I looked into how I was being cheated, not because of the money but because of the principle of the thing (fathers shouldn’t cheat sons), I discovered things about my family, and…
2013 National Book Festival Extravapalooza
The 13th annual National Book Festival is this weekend (September 21-22) on the National Mall. Two days of nonstop books and authors: the decision isn’t whether to go, it’s who to go see when you do! Here’s a preview of some of the authors you may want to see this…
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie United, partitioned, ravaged, renewed. Atonement by Ian McEwan Nobody gets a mulligan. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Satan moves to Moscow. On Writing by Stephen King Sit down. Write. Repeat. In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson Everything’s funnier Down Under. Have a…
“We’re the reason you have no attention span. And you can pin reality TV on us too. You’re welcome.” (Mark Goodman, VJ) Cut. “The [MTV] studio was such a communal den of jackassery.” (Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, The Kennedy Chronicles) Cut. “Western civilization began on a Friday night in November 1982.”…
More than one reviewer has compared River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid The Curious Glory of Urban Iowa — Ben Miller’s dark and joyful recollection of his childhood in Davenport, Iowa during the 70s — to Moby-Dick, and with good reason. Miller’s detailed, frenetic prose and…
The shortlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize has just been announced. Let’s take a look at the six nominees:We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo: Stretching from Zimbabwe to Michigan, the hardship and rootlessness of a young girl’s life is the focus of this debut novel.The Luminaries by Eleanor…
Someone once described Alice as the raisin in the oatmeal Dear (powerful agent, preferably with Hollywood connections): A, my name is Alice, I’ve lived in America, Africa, and Asia, and I’m an aspiring author. Below please see the outline of my proposed memoir, The Letter A, each chapter of which…
Author’s Chat: Amal Ghandour and Hanan al Shaykh
Hanan al Shaykh always looks like she is about to break into a smile. Even when she’s in deep thought, her mouth is at a slight angle, ready to gently tilt up. It’s not affability that registers like a hint on the face, but a sly playfulness that is meant…
Sometimes there are things to say that don’t fit in a book review or Q&A: funny riffs, insightful takes, even full-on rants. Starting this week, this space will feature regular bits from three of our regular contributors: Alice Stephens, Larry De Maria, and Darrell Delamaide. Plus, you’ll notice more from…
5 Books to Get You in the Back-to-School Spirit
1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. “Classic” is too stodgy a word for Amis’ debut novel, published in 1954, so we’ll go with “still funny half a century later.” When Jim Dixon lands a teaching spot at a British university, mayhem and mocking ensue. 2. Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women…
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