Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise.Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became int...more
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole world changes when he and his friends find the...more
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-liv...more
For those who think that travel guidebooks are the gospel truth.The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant “...more
While cycling through the western states, a disillusioned American questions the meaning of existence after confronting the ghost of his former, uninstitutionalized self, in a new edition of the classic philosophical treatise on the art of living with quality. Reprint.
Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland ...more
The ever-surprising John Updike’s twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur’an, as expounded to him by a local mosque’s imam.The son of an Irish-American mother and a...more
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