novel
The novelist and the theologian
I’m trying to live as Haruki Murakami writes: with questions but not an end in mind.
by Brian Bantum
Tara Stringfellow’s fictional family brings a real city to life
Like Memphis, Memphis is gritty—filled with danger, tragedy, and humor.
Essential reading: Fiction
We asked some of our favorite novelists and poets to tell us about three recent works of fiction that speak to them in a deep way.
-
A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler's 20th novel is, like her previous 19, about a mildly dysfunctional Baltimore family of loyal yet infuriating people who love one another, but not always helpfully.
reviewed by LaVonne Neff
God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison
In her 11th novel Toni Morrison returns to the foundation of most of her fiction: childhood and its traumatic effects.
reviewed by Amy Frykholm
Accidents of Providence, by Stacia M. Brown
Paul Elie has lamented the absence of serious engagement with Christianity in contemporary fiction. He should read Stacia Brown.
reviewed by Ian Curran
The preacher’s wife
In a crucial scene of Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila spends the morning thinking, has lunch, then thinks some more. Why isn’t this boring?
by Amy Frykholm
All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews
This is a book about deep, protracted, unrelenting sadness, and it knows it.
reviewed by Amy Frykholm
The Childhood of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee reportedly wanted readers to discover the title of The Childhood of Jesus after reading it. I thought of this often as I read it.
reviewed by Amy Frykholm
Dust, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Owuor's novel wrestles with Kenya's bitter remnants of colonialism. Yet it suggests that the future can be shaped by people who are willing to incorporate the past with honesty and integrity.
reviewed by Amy Frykholm
Fine doorstops
Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch connects to both head and heart, while Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit tells of Theodore Roosevelt, an endlessly fascinating figure.
Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick
The title of Nathaniel Philbrick’s slim new meditation foregrounds the questions at the heart of every assignment made by every English teacher: Why read this book? Or that book? For that matter, why do we assign reading in the first place?
reviewed by Harold K. Bush
Free for what?
Franzen has turned his considerable novelistic talents to a kind of inquisitorial examination of the American ideal of freedom. He shows how freedom is negatively construed—focused on what we are free from and not on what freedom might be for, what worthy ends it might be used to pursue.