Celebrating Community
The cheapest type of movie you can make is a movie that takes place on paper – that is, a novel. Cinema and prose fiction are different art forms with different strengths, but don’t tell that to Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995), the French crime novelist whose 1972 literary sensation Nada recently appeared in English for the first time, thanks to New […]
Téa Obreht’s former student reviews her long-awaited sequel Téa Obreht’s new novel Inland is a triumphant sweeping epic that sets out across the American West following two narrators: Lurie, a stateless orphan turned outlaw trying to claim his place in the world, and Nora, a frontierswoman clinging to the community she helped build as her husband and oldest sons go […]
It’s been nearly a decade since the world heard from Jackson Brodie, the sardonic private eye at the heart of British novelist Kate Atkinson’s series of mysteries. He was probably glad to have a vacation. Brodie has been through a lot in the course of his adventures, not least a seemingly perpetual midlife crisis, which he wrestles with at least […]
WE WHO INHERIT THE EARTH It’s not just saints and prophets who endure the weak, the lame, the denialists. So too do Mets fans comprise such noble breed. To endure the hell of rooting for fallen heroes – great athletes who won’t bust it out of the box, adjust too eagerly to failure, or break down upon doing a deal […]
By Casey Mahoney For those familiar with the exquisite essays of Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future will be comforting terrain. Hustvedt’s latest circles her more pressing themes of female erasure, the fallibility of memory, and the bizarre fact that imagination always plays a role in our sense of the “present.” The situations in this novel are also familiar, namely, artists behaving oddly, cruelly, or bravely. While readers of Hustvedt’s […]
At 6 p.m. on Monday, April 8th, author Veronica Chambers, best known for her 1997 memoir Mama’s Girl, will be speaking in the library at P.S. 15, Patrick F. Daly Magnet School for the Arts, located at 71 Sullivan Street. Hosted by Friends of P.S. 15, the event is free and open to the public. Chambers, born in Panama, was […]
Like the majority of people these days, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has announced her candidacy for President of the United States in 2020. According to most polls, zero to three percent of Democratic voters would choose Gillibrand among the slate of likely primary candidates. Her unpopularity may seem strange to prognosticators who initially saw the senator as a plausible […]
“Does anyone remember the counselor…?” began the post on my old summer camp’s social media page. I did not know the former camper who was asking, nor did I recognize the vague description of the young adult being accused of allegedly taking advantage, but I was spooked to realize that while I was playing dodgeball and enjoying free swim, someone […]
“The House Children,” (April 2019) author Heidi Daniele’s debut novel, tells the story of the unlucky and illegitimate child, Mary Margaret, renamed Peg by the stern but not unkind nuns of the industrial school where she is sent. This is Ireland, and the year is 1937. As we hear, again and again, there was no choice for Mary Margaret’s mother, Norah Hanley, to give […]
“If you can dance through this, Esme, you can dance through anything.” In The Lily in the Light by Brooklyn author Kristin Fields, the “this” to which the teacher of 11-year-old aspiring ballerina Esme Johnson refers is the disappearance of her 4-year-old sister, Lily. Don’t expect, however, a whodunit-cum-Law & Order episode where Queens, where the Johnsons reside, goes out […]