Fiction Archive

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie - The favorite writer of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is rumored to have been Jean Rhys (1890-1979). If so, that says a lot, for the main character in a novel by Rhys tends to be

Alan Furst: Blood of Victory - Countries need oil for blood, steel for bone, rubber for feet. And in wartime, even more so. Think back to your American History courses. Why did the South lose the

Alan Furst: Dark Voyage - I spent my free moments this week reading my favorite kind of book --- one you can't put down. I read on buses, as I walked, while waiting for friends at

Alan Furst: Mission to Paris - If you try to convey your enthusiasm for “Mission to Paris” to someone who has never read any of Alan Furst’s novels, you may have a hard time. These are

Alan Furst: Spies of the Balkans - It’s a bittersweet day around here when a new Alan Furst novel arrives. On the plus side: I get to spend an entire day reading about 1939 or 1940, generally in

Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent - The heroes of international thrillers are usually manly men, built on the John Wayne model. If they have inner lives, they're in flight from them. Women are simply

Alan Furst: The Spies of Warsaw - The “spy” is “an ordinary-looking man, who led a rather ordinary life” --- he's a mid-level engineer at a German ironworks, married, with three children. But as he takes the

Albert Camus: The Plague - If you were taking something like 20th Century Thought, you read it in English. If you were studying French, you struggled through it in the original. Either way, the pages are, for

Alice Bliss - Tell me you wouldn’t react as I did. The name of the novel is “Alice Bliss.” That is, not surprisingly, the name of the 14-year-old main character, who lives with her

Alice Munro: Dear Life - I did not go home for my mother's last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely

All Quiet on the Western Front - The reaction to this book, from the beginning, was astonishing. Published in 1929, it sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. The film won Oscars for Best

All the King’s Men - This 1946 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Robert Penn Warren, is generally considered the greatest of all American political novels. The 1949 film is just as great: It

All Things Cease to Appear - STEPHEN KING: "Ghosts, murder, a terrifying psychotic who seems normal, and beautiful writing. Loved it." ---- Where do books come from? Unlikely places. For Elizabeth Brundage, “All Things Cease to Appear” came

An Officer and a Spy - "An Officer and a Spy" is a page-turner of a novel about a soldier who is fraudulently judged, an officer who learns the truth, a truth that is suppressed, and

Andre Dubus: A story about a murder - As he drops his kids off at his ex-wife’s house in winter, a father realizes that the condensation on the windows of his car is the warm breath of his

Andre Dubus: Selected Stories - He was a small boy from Louisiana who listened to the opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons. When he graduated from college, he joined the Marines. And

Ann Patchett: Commonwealth - Ann Patchett is fiction’s current heartthrob. She’s written books that have literary merit and commercial appeal --- “Bel Canto” sold a million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.

Annie Ernaux - As a reader, I’m prone to sudden, extreme enthusiasms --- they’re like crushes. With Annie Ernaux, that first happened in 2004, when I read “Simple Passion,” a novel-that-read-like-a-memoir. Even better,

Another Side of Paradise - I can’t remember who had the first success with a book that promised the untold, inside story of a famous writer, but it seems to have spawned a cottage industry.