A Map of Betrayal
Throughout his thirty years as a CIA agent spying for the People’s Republic of China, Gary Weimin Shang, the protagonist in Ha Jin’s psychological novel A Map of Betrayal, betrays…
Fiction
48 posts
Fiction of the imagination to experience and remember.
The Sound of Things Falling
There is this about the novel The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The push and pull between reason and emotion, choice and chance, life and death—a trio of diametrical pairings played against each other in the life of the narrator, Antonio Yammara.
On Lucky Shores
In On Lucky Shores, Kerry Donovan introduces guitarist, singer, drifter Chet Walker. When we first meet Walker, he’s walking the Rocky Mountains, away from his troubled past and to, he…
Falling Out of Time
Sometimes a book tears open the fabric of being and forces the reader to question the meaning of existence. A masterpiece of existentialist inquiry, Falling Out of Time by the eminent Israeli author David Grossman is such a book.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
On the face of it, Muriel Barbery’s international bestseller, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, is a sentimental tale about a fifty-four-year-old woman who pretends to be illiterate and inept but is actually…
Revisiting Tennessee Williams
During the Great Recession, I didn’t have any spending money to go and buy new books or even used books for that matter, and I needed to read some good…
The Tiger’s Wife
The Tiger’s Wife, the acclaimed novel by Téa Obreht, is not for the fainthearted. The Yugoslav Wars of the early to mid-1990s hover in the background, threatening to overtake the narrative.…