Fall Literary Season 2009. The day Dieutor walked away from his village to escape poverty, he erased everything behind him. Family, house, friends, love—gone. "I come from a tiny village. That's one of the things I'd forgotten." Starting over means burning the past...

It's autumn. Yeah, I know the temps are still mild, but trust me—it's autumn. How can you tell? Days shrink, leaves drop, and it rains. It rains reading challenges. This year I'm diving into several challenges that actually interest me...

Fall Literary Season 2009. "Life is just spending time preparing for something that never arrives." (Yeats) Anna Song is a prodigy pianist trapped by illness in her Norman manor. No more stages, no more audiences. So she pours everything into her students instead...

Here's my rundown of everything I read this fall season. Francophone novels: Dirty Feet by Edem Awumey, New Indians by Jocelyn Bonnerave, The Club of Incorrigible Optimists by Jean-Michel Guenassia, Crossroads of Solitudes by someone whose name I've already forgotten...

Fall Literary Season 2009. Vera Candida was born and raised on Vatapuna, an island where time stopped moving, somewhere off what's probably South America. She bolts one rainy night because staying means suffocating...

Fall Literary Season 2009. Alice Munro, Canadian writer born 1931 in Ontario, digs into her father's family history here—the Laidlaws from Scotland. It starts with William Laidlaw, nicknamed Will O'Phaup, living in the borderlands before crossing the ocean...

Fall Literary Season 2009. The Dirty Feet—that's what they call the wanderers, the migrants, the vagabonds pushed onto roads by hunger, thirst, fear. Heading north, always north, chasing a better life. Askia is one of them. His wandering started long ago...

Dempsy, in greater New York's outer ring, is a wrecked city housing a Black ghetto called Armstrong—ground zero for danger and desperation. Drugs, violence, alcoholism. One sweltering summer night, an injured young woman staggers into the emergency room...

Fall Literary Season 2009. Victor grew up in Slobozia, an isolated village in Romanian Moldavia. Life wasn't exactly cheerful between a pious mother and a violent father. But he found refuge deep in the forest, by the Lion's Pit...

I knew you were waiting for it. After the 100 favorite novels of the French, here come the 100 favorite novels of the British. First observation: plenty of overlap with the French list (though weirdly, no Bible or Proust). Second: the Brits love their classics hard...