Book Reviews Archives - Page 7 of 11 - Late Last Night Books

↓

JAVASCRIPT IS DISABLED. Please enable JavaScript on your browser to best view this site.

Book Review: Open Country, A Civil War Novel in Stories

In my last posting, I highlighted Foreword Reviews magazine and its mission to draw readers to the best of independent publishing. What is perhaps most remarkable in the world of indie publishing is the sheer number of presses operating more or less on a shoestring in an industry whose margins continue to shrink. Indie presses typically don’t make fortunes for their owners, so what makes those people keep at it?

In a word, passion. Okay, perhaps two words, the other being dedication. Both are crucial to persevering in the best-seller-driven world ruled by publishing’s Big Five, but that big-press culture certainly leaves behind underserved readers and underrepresented writing voices, which is where indie presses shine.

Passion, dedication, and perseverance all describe Richard Peabody, the force behind Gargoyle, the Washington, D.C.-based

(Continue Reading)

Paint It Black

Paint It Black, The Song, and The Novel

A Review of Paint It Black, a novel by Janet Fitch

Happy Friday the 13^th. Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the Rolling Stones release of their iconic song “Paint It Black.” I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate this anniversary than with a brief discussion of the song, and since Late Last Night Books is a literary blog, include a review of Janet Fitch’s 2006 best selling novel by the same name.

Astute readers will notice the album cover has a coma between “It” and “Black.” Grammarians among us will interrupt this to mean a man by the name of Black is being instructed to paint “It”…whatever “It” is.

(Continue Reading)

Writers Can’t Get Enough of World War II

5/7/16 — Novelists Still Intrigued by World War II

What is it about war that produces such compelling literature? And what is it about World War II, in particular, that continues to capture us like none other?

As long as there has been war—and that’s since the beginning of time—storytellers have been trying to capture the experience, first to preserve it for history (think epics like Homer’s Iliad) and then to try to make sense of it. They have tried to explore it as tragedy (Shakespeare’s Henry V), as philosophy (Tolstoy’s War and Peace), through psychology (Pat Barker’s Resurrection), as memoir (My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell) and even as comedy (Joseph Heller’s Catch 22).

(Continue Reading)

Review – Golden Age of Murder

4/17/2016 – Review: The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards

Here’s an excellent read for mystery buffs written by Martin Edwards, author of the Lake District mysteries and a commentator on detective fiction. The Golden Age of Murder is a history of an elite club of outstanding mystery writers from the 30s and 40s.

This delightful book is full of interesting tidbits about the lives and personalities of the club members and guests. It opens with Ngaio Marsh’s impressions of a meeting in 1937. She was a guest for the evening, which began with a banquet in an opulent dining room. The meal ended, everyone rose and the party adjourned to another room, where the ritual began. With lights out, a door opens and the Orator enters holding a taper.

(Continue Reading)

A Book Review of Girls, a Novel by Frederick Busch

A Book Review of

Girls, a Novel by Frederick Busch

It has been said that Frederick Busch is a writer’s writer. He was an award-winning author whose books were loved by critics but ignored by the mass audience required for climbing bestseller lists. And that’s too bad for readers, for they are missing out on beautifully woven, poetically told, compelling stories of the intimate lives and tragedies of ordinary people.

(Continue Reading)

BOOK REVIEW: THE KEPT BY JAMES SCOTT

4/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW: THE KEPT BY JAMES SCOTT

Several years I ago I stood on a red-rock mountain in Arches National Park, Utah, and looked across a vista of severe canyons and soaring rock formations, including amazing natural arches. The land was stark, but it was beautiful. In the same way, The Kept, a novel by James Scott, is beautiful. It’s not the kind of novel that welcomes you with warmth, but it takes your breath with its incisive characterizations and the harsh realities they reveal. The characters of The Kept expose the good and bad in all of us with crystal sharp clarity.

The Kept opens with Elspeth Howell arriving at her isolated home in upstate New York after months away working as a midwife.

(Continue Reading)

West of Sunset Book Review

4/7/16 — Stewart O’Nan’s Novel Take on F. Scott Fitzgerald

It takes a lot of courage for an author to write a fictional book about a writer who’s almost as famous for his life as for his novels. Stewart O’Nan meets the challenge with West of Sunset, a novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald. In O’Nan’s imaginings we’re shown a depth, intelligence, and artistic struggle that meshes beautifully with the outlines of Fitzgerald’s life that his fans know so well.

The 2015 novel is a fictionalized account of the last three years of the famous author’s life. In the opening chapter, the forty-year-old Fitzgerald is no longer the golden boy of the literary set. In poor health and financially strapped, he’s about to leave the East Coast for Hollywood to work as a script-writing hack for MGM.

(Continue Reading)

Book Reviews: Two Finalists for INDIEFAB Best Literary Fiction 2015

3/20/16: Celebrating Vibrant Voices in Independent Publishing: 2015 Debut Novelists Caitlin Hicks and Barbara Stark-Nemon

Last summer, eight debut novelists gathered for 30 minutes in the virtual, electronic community of Twitter to compare first-time experiences, discuss the thrill of (finally!) being a published author, and exchange ideas about how to shift from creator to marketer in order to find an audience for our small, independently published books.

Geographically far-flung and working in a number of genres, we were brought together by a feature article about our eight books in the Summer 2015 issue of Foreword Reviews magazine, a well-respected quarterly periodical and website that focuses entirely on reviewing work published by independent presses—that is, anything not from an imprint of The Big Five publishing conglomerates.

(Continue Reading)

Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough

Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough

The stereotype that writers are considered to be a bit odd or reclusive is perhaps because they are odd and reclusive. John J. Ross, a physician at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and guest editor for the prestigious quarterly Infectious Diseases Clinics of North America, has written a highly readable and entertaining book that delves into the lives and illnesses of some of our most famous and beloved authors. His book is an easy to read combination biography, review of classic literature, and medical journal.

(Continue Reading)

3/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW—MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

3/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW—MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

When I learned that Elena Ferrante (a pen name) refused to reveal any information about herself because she believed her novels should stand on their own, I wanted to applaud. As Mark Willen explained in his post on Late Last Night Books in July, Ferrante believes that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” What a refreshing idea. I couldn’t wait to read My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy. Here’s what I found: the novel definitely stands on its own, but it’s almost as difficult to talk about as its enigmatic author.

(Continue Reading)

Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars reviewed by Gary Garth McCann

2/20/16 REVIEW OF A HOUSE MADE OF STARS, A NOVEL BY TAWNYSHA GREENE The more fascinating because of the unique narrator—a man’s 10-year-old deaf daughter—is this story of abuse committed by a manic-depressive, unemployed (and probably unemployable) father, himself the child victim of abuse by a deaf mother. The abuse he commits is allowed to continue by his helpless, complicit wife, the mother of their children and a psychological victim of fundamentalist Christianity’s tenet that wives should be submissive to their husbands. The wife’s own mother wants her daughter to bring the children and live in safety and
economic stability with her.

(Continue Reading)

Another Look at Catcher in the Rye

2/7/16 — Another Look at The Catcher in the Rye

I don’t recall how old I was when I first read J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye–fourteen or fifteen, perhaps. Everyone seemed to be reading it then, and afterward, everyone seemed to adapt Salinger’s writing style. English classes became tedious as student after student read his “original” composition in an imitation of Holden Caulfield’s voice.

All of us wanted to be Holden Caulfield. We wanted to travel through New York as he did — alone, with money in our pockets, and at all hours. We wanted to read the books he liked, drink scotch, and call out the phonies. We liked that he was a straight talker, glib and slangy, a no-holds-barred kind of guy, our generation’s John Wayne.

(Continue Reading)

WORLD’S FIRST NOVEL—AND THE WINNER IS…

I just finished reading Sarah Ruden’s acclaimed translation of The Golden Ass, a 2^ndcentury AD, a classic and wonderfully ridiculous work that has been called the world’s first novel. And then it dawned on me: just recently I had read (and blogged about) a couple of other first novels of sorts, The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote. I started wondering: just how many novels have claimed this title?

(Continue Reading)

Book Review: the reasons I won’t be coming by Elliot Perlman

The cliché advice to writers is, “write what you know,” and if Elliot Perlman’s collection of short stories is based on what he knows and has personally experienced, then I feel very, very sorry for him.

The characters in these nine stories deal mainly with rejection in one form or another, and the reader watches as they spiral down a path of depression. This is not a book filled with cheerful stories and happy outcomes, but nevertheless, it is still a worthy read.

(Continue Reading)

Review of Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston

Reading Bret Anthony Johnston’s Remember Me Like This brought me back to 2003, when kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart was released after eight months in captivity. I was teaching a course in journalism ethics and I asked my students to assess the media coverage, which included 24/7 speculation about why Smart hadn’t escaped earlier and what horrors she’d been subjected to. That led to a vigorous debate over the conflict between the right to privacy and the public’s right to know. I argued that in this case there was no right to know, only prurient interest and morbid curiosity. Not everyone agreed (and certainly not cable news). If only Anthony’s novel had been available then, it would have been assigned reading. It’s the perfect answer to media callousness.

(Continue Reading)

Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, a Killer Nashville Anthology

Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, a Killer Nashville Anthology

Killer Nashville is an international thriller, mystery, crime literature writers’ conference held annually in downtown Nashville, TN. The conference draws some of the genre’s best writers to mix and mingle with aspiring authors and fans.

This year, for the first time, conference founder, Clay Stafford, produced a collection of twenty short stories for the anthology Cold-Blooded. He’s pulled together such well-known thriller writers as, Jeffery Deaver, Anne Perry, Robert Dugoni, Heywood Gould, Maggie Toussaint, Mary Burton, Donald Bain, and Jefferson Bass. But the collection also includes many equally talented but lesser known writers, and it is works of seven of those people that I would like to introduce you to.

(Continue Reading)

12/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: THE TIDE KING BY JEN MICHALSKI

12/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: THE TIDE KING BY JEN MICHALSKI

Jen Michalski is a wonderful storyteller. You could read her novel The Tide King purely for the characters and events that fit in with the reality we know. One reviewer on Amazon said she’d done that, finding the eternal-life-giving herb in the story unnecessary. If you read the novel that way, you’ll be treated to a beautiful piece of writing with well-developed characters and an exciting plot, but you will miss so much.

In her guest blog, “A Jolt of Vertigo,” published on Late Last Night Books last month, Michalski said she found herself writing about the fantastic herb because “sometimes reality is too constricting.” I never thought I would be a fan of magical realism in novels because I’ve always considered myself a true realist, a person who tells it like it is in her writing and her life.

(Continue Reading)

The Novels of Paul Auster

12/7/2015 — Reading and Appreciating Paul Auster

I’ve become a big fan of the American writer Paul Auster—and not just because his first novella, City of Glass, was rejected by seventeen publishers before finding a home and launching a prolific, thirty-year literary career (and yes, that means I’m a bit late in joining his fan club). I read the New York Trilogy (which includes City of Glass) last year and loved it, but it was only last month that circumstances led to me to pick up another Auster novel, Invisible (2009), which I found even more fascinating.

(Continue Reading)

STAY-AT-HOME DADS: BRAFF’S THE DADDY DIARIES AND PERROTTA’S LITTLE CHILDREN

11/20/15 STAY-AT-HOME DADS: BRAFF’S THE DADDY DIARIES AND PERROTTA’S LITTLE CHILDREN I’ve bought three books because of tweets. Joshua Braff’s The Daddy Diaries was one. I expected a stay-at-home dad with an infant or toddlers, in the vein of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. But the children in Joshua Braff’s novel aren’t little. The protagonist’s daughter is 10, his son 13.

(Continue Reading)

The Holocaust Memoir

10/17/2015 – The Holocaust Memoir

Thank you to Steve Feuer and his Gihon River Press, http://www.gihonriverpress.com, whose mission is to honor the memory of the millions who died in the Holocaust by publishing the stories of those who survived. One of his authors is Miriam M. Brysk, a child survivor who has written two powerful books about the Holocaust.

(Continue Reading)

↑