"A writer's job is to introduce doubt where there was certainty. Sort of the opposite of a politician, if you want." Take one Parisian writer, slightly past his prime, still in love with literature but firmly stuck in a rut. Add Norwegian crime fiction, existential dread, and a touch of self-awareness.
Keep Reading"She fears what she calls a general fading of life within herself. Her sensations lose their power, their light, their brilliance." Three years ago, Vincent Message completely floored me with Defeat of the Masters. Now he's back with another mind-bender.
Keep Reading"I pledged my service not to an agency or a government, but to the common interest, to defend our Constitution, which protects civil liberties that are being trampled without shame." This is the story everyone knows—but not like this. Snowden tells it himself.
Keep Reading"His heart could barely contain everything he felt. Either it swelled to the sky or shrank to the size of a pin, hard to say." After her extraordinary novel Furies, Lauren Groff returns with a collection of stories set in the strange, swampy heart of Florida.
Keep Reading"Free or locked up, women were safe nowhere. They'd always been the first affected by decisions made without their consent." I rarely rush to read a book that everyone's talking about. But this one grabbed me by the throat. Paris, 1885, the Salpêtrière asylum.
Keep Reading"He was struck by how much lives diverge, and how powerless each of us is in the face of circumstance. And where's God in all this?" Newark, summer 1944. The U.S. is at war, but young athletic Bucky Cantor can't serve. Instead, he faces a different enemy: polio.
Keep Reading"We discover together, with the same joy, the same wonder, the brand-new coat of snow. From now on, daylight is born from the earth. The weak light of the sky is generously reflected by an infinity of crystals." A survival story set in the Arctic, told with poetic precision.
Keep Reading"All I see in retrospect is the chaos of history repeating itself infinitely, replaying, reinterpreting, the world, its degenerate heart beating beneath us, failing, screwing up again and again, while continuing its course." A road trip through America's fractured present. Migration, memory, and the stories we tell.
Keep Reading