BNA_Daily | August 29, 2010
Many fans of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” series have probably already finished Mockingjay, the series’ third and final installment that released on Tuesday, but we’ve collected some reviews anyway. In the series’ third book, readers are taken to District 13, the underground city that houses the resistance movement. With a war against the Capitol looming, [...]
BNA_Daily | August 20, 2010
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom–that book everyone keeps talking about–doesn’t come out until August 31st, but the reviews are already piling up. So far, the consensus seems to be that if you liked Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections, you’ll love Freedom. As Sam Anderson explains in New York magazine, “Freedom is a close cousin to The Corrections: [...]
BNA_Daily | August 12, 2010
Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere but Here (1986) and PEN/Faulkner Award-nominated Off Keck Road (2000), illuminates the tensions of modern motherhood in her latest novel My Hollywood. The novel revolves around Claire, a well-to-do if slightly dull wife and mother, and Lola, Claire’s Filipina nanny. Lola cares for Claire’s baby, William, while Claire struggles to [...]
BNA_Daily | August 9, 2010
Gary Shteyngart, hilarious and critically acclaimed author of Absurdistan, is back with a new, equally biting satire. Super Sad True Love Story takes place in a not-so-distant dystopian future, where the 39-year-old protagonist, Lenny, is hopelessly over the hill, and his 20-something love interest, Eunice, doesn’t have a meaningful thought in her tech-crazed head. Ron [...]
BNA_Daily | July 23, 2010
If you admire the stark, gritty writing of modern authors like Denis Johnson and Mary Robison, you’ll want to check out John Brandon’s Citrus County. In Citrus County, Brandon (Arkansas) employs his token dark humor and tightly-woven narrative to tell the story of deeply troubled middle schoolers living in a small, Florida town. Toby, the [...]
BNA_Daily | July 16, 2010
Chances are, you’ve heard some of the buzz about Jennifer Egan’s latest book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. Since its release in early June, the book–part novel, part linked stories, totally unique–has collected glowing reviews from one publication after the next. Egan is known for her vivid insight and postmodern experimentation, and in Goon [...]
BNA_Daily | July 14, 2010
Facebook: a do-gooder’s attempt to better the world, or a threat to personal privacy? In The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, author David Kirkpatrick, a former technology editor at Fortune, delves into the company’s history and discusses the implications of such a widespread phenomenon. According to New [...]
BNA_Daily | July 6, 2010
For fans of David Mitchell (the two-time Booker finalist and author of Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream), this week wasn’t about Eclipse–it was about the U.S. release of Mitchell’s long awaited fifth novel, The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet. Unlike Mitchell’s first three novels, with postmodern tricks and genre shifts galore, Thousand Autums is a [...]
BNA_Daily | June 24, 2010
Christopher Hitchens–outspoken journalist, political activist, essayist, and author of God is Not Great–refuses to be pinned down on one side of the political spectrum, and the Los Angeles Times calls his byline “the most archly kinetic in current-day American letters.” In Hitch-22: A Memoir, Hitchens discusses the life events that got him to his current [...]
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, [...]
