Upheavals
From a National Book Award winner’s raw yet elegant memoir to an architect of the modern Internet who died during the 9/11 attacks.
Sarah Stodola is the author of the forthcoming book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors. In addition to The Daily Beast, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal and The Awl, among others.
Fantasies
From a newly translated 1972 classic about women in the Caribbean to the latest in Benjamin Black/John Banville’s crime series.
Neighbors
From a novel of Brooklyn neuroses to what happens when evangelicals take over an Alaskan national park.
Eccentrics
From a 1980s literary superstar’s return to a study of American trailblazers with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Obese characters used to be there for comic relief, but as our waistlines expand, fiction writers are starting to take them more seriously. Sarah Stodola weighs the state of obesity in the novel.
Changes
This week, from a childhood interrupted by war in Sri Lanka to the glory days of food reviewing.
DOUBLE DUTCH
A Dutch novel by Herman Koch has already sold more than a million copies worldwide. But can it take America? By Sarah Stodola.
Fighting Words
Bret Easton Ellis unleashed a string of nasty tweets on the late David Foster Wallace, but it’s not the first literary assault on Twitter.
From Jack Kerouac’s newly published first novel to Irene Nemirovsky’s forgotten work, 10 novels that were thought lost but then found. By Sarah Stodola.
Lovers have penned their passions to one another for centuries. In Love Letters, the British Library has collected some of the more memorable missives.