BNA_Daily | June 18, 2010
Justin Cronin’s The Passage, out last week, is a post-apocalyptic tale of vampires and military experiments gone awry that the Washington Post calls “this summer’s most wildly hyped novel.” So does it live up to the buzz? According to most reviewers, yes. Though this is Cronin’s first foray into science fiction (his 2002 literary debut, [...]
BNA_Daily | June 10, 2010
It was hard to decide which book to cover this week–new fiction came out from Ann Beattie, Jennifer Egan, and the late Henry Roth–but Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake stood out as a unique, emotionally engaging novel that’s been racking up good reviews since its release last week. Bender (author of An [...]
BNA_Daily | June 3, 2010
First there was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, followed by last summer’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, and now, finally, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The “girl” in the titles is, of course, Lisbeth Salander, the gutsy, mysterious hacker who steals the show in Stieg Larsson’s bestselling trilogy. In the first [...]
BNA_Daily | March 25, 2010
Today we turn to British critics to give us a glimpse of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar. Solar hits shelves in the U.S. next Tuesday, and the reviews so far are mixed–some critics praise the book’s humorous take on climate change, while others find the protagonist, Michael Beard, one-dimensional and tiresome. Beard is a physicist [...]
thomas_b | March 24, 2010
Stories of financial collapse can be illuminating at any time, but especially during times of financial collapse. Sometimes a writer of fiction seems to predict the present with such clarity that it leads one to suspect he has a crystal ball; other books reflect on the current times by looking at previous disasters. Three recent [...]
BNA_Editor | January 13, 2010
1. More Reading, Fewer Books Sold:
In January of this year, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report titled “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy” that pronounced this seemingly contradictory message: Americans are reading more (more than half of adults surveyed said they had read one work of literary [...]
BNA_Daily | September 29, 2009
Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, is back with a new novel about love and the supernatural. Her Fearful Symmetry begins with the death of the 40-something protagonist, Elspeth. An identical twin herself, Elspeth leaves her London flat to her identical twin nieces from Chicago, Julia and Valentina. The problem is, Elspeth [...]
BNA_Daily | September 15, 2009
After 6 years and 2 mediocre films to tide us over, the follow up to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code hits stores tomorrow. The Lost Symbol follows protagonist Robert Langdon on another epic, mysterious adventure, this time in our nation’s capital. After discovering his friend’s severed hand in the Capitol building, [...]
BNA_Daily | August 21, 2009
Jonathan Tropper, author of How to Talk to a Widow and Plan B, is back with This Is Where I Leave You, a novel the Los Angeles Times calls “often hilarious and often heartbreaking.” Judd Foxman’s father has died, leaving Judd thrust under the same roof as his siblings and mother to observe the Jewish [...]
BNA_Daily | August 4, 2009
Richard Russo’s latest novel, That Old Cape Magic, is out today, his second novel since Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls in 2001. That Old Cape Magic tells the story of Jack Griffin, a middle-aged screenwriting professor who must spread his parents’ ashes on Cape Cod, where he vacationed as a child. The task sends him reeling [...]
