Roy Miller's Blog, page 185
May 19, 2017
McGill Relaunching the Cundill Prize
This content was originally published by on 18 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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McGill University is relaunching its Cundhill History Prize in its 10th anniversary year. The prize recognizes, according to a release, “the best history writing in English,” and comes with a $75,000 (U.S.) purse. Two runners up each receive a Recognition of Excellence Award and a $10,000 purse.
The university decided to revamp the prize, it said, “to illuminate the truth at a time in world affairs when informed, factual debate is increasingly losing out to populism and retrenchment.”
Margaret MacMillan, the author of Nixon in China and the chair of the 2017 prize jury, said: “History—good, readable, evidence-based history—is part of the toolbox of democracy. We live in a challenging world and it is more important than ever to understand ourselves and others, where we came from and where we might be going, and only history can provide those insights.”
The prize is open to any books published in English from any country in the world, regardless of nationality or residence of their authors. Works in translation are also eligible.
“At what feels like a turning point in world affairs, we at McGill believe it is more important than ever to champion the highest quality historical scholarship produced anywhere across the globe,” Antonia Maioni, dean of the faculty of arts at McGill, said in a statement. “The Cundill History Prize seeks books that will appeal to a broad audience, ignite conversation, evoke a better understanding of humanity and illuminate the truth at a time when objective facts are increasingly losing out to populism.”
Submissions for the prize are open until June 16 for books published in English between June 1, 2016, and May 31, 2017. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in Montreal on November 16.
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Sir Harold Evans Gets Righteous About Writing
This content was originally published by on 18 May 2017 | 3:40 pm.
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Choosing the right words can be the difference between life and death, says Sir Harold Evans.
Evans, a legendary editor knighted by the Queen of England for his service to journalism, spent a lifetime pouring over documents. He’s corrected files from reporters on the battlefield, memos by past U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and now, Evans is out with a new book that celebrates the importance of clear writing. It’s called, “Do I Make Myself Clear: Why Writing Well Matters.”
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Stories – The New York Times
This content was originally published by LINCOLN MICHEL on 19 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
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John Gall
THE TEETH OF THE COMB
And Other Stories
By Osama Alomar
Translated by C. J. Collins with Osama Alomar
102 pp. New Directions, paper, $13.95.
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If Kafka had rewritten Aesop’s fables, the result might have looked like this thought-provoking new collection of literary allegories and aphorisms. Alomar, born in Syria and living in Pittsburgh, uses these ancient forms to comment on current politics, sometimes in as little as a sentence or two. (Here for example is “The Knife”: “He was born with a silver knife in his mouth. And he was its first victim.”) Global wars, dictators and the failures of democracy are recurring subjects. “Strong and Weak signed a peace agreement,” one story posits. Weak hangs his copy in a gold frame; Strong uses his “to make a diaper for his baby.”
Not every story is overtly political. Many humorously remind us that our beliefs depend on vantage. Humans praise a bird as “a symbol of life’s gentle-hearted beauty,” while a fearful caterpillar screams, “The beast has come!” Nor is Alomar always cynical, even about the worst tragedies. When a civil war “spread its ashes everywhere,” the people flee and the “lonely” buildings huddle together. After the war, the buildings’ intimacy stays, and consequently “human relationships became far warmer and closer than they had ever been.” Timely and timeless, “The Teeth of the Comb” is a masterly collection by an urgent literary voice.
BEST WORST AMERICAN
Stories
By Juan Martinez
198 pp. Small Beer, paper, $16.
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Martinez’s debut showcases a try-anything approach to narrative. One story is spun from a girlfriend’s kitten posters; another imagines a karaoke nightclub for introverted literary types. (“Postmodernists drink. Minimalists, they don’t drink so much.”) Although the prose is always sharp and imaginative, some of the absurdist flash fictions feel slightly undercooked. Where Martinez truly shines is in the longer stories, in which lost characters try to figure out a confusing world. “Life is essentially a string of failures,” the narrator of “Souvenirs From Ganymede” says. “We fail to stay in one place. We fail to be the people we’d like to be.” Martinez has a great eye for the everyday surreal, as when he describes the placards at an anti-abortion rally as “awful smudges of pink and red against black, like the flags of the worst country in the world.” Even the straightforward realist stories are distinct in subject and execution. One centers on a South American Coca-Cola executive trapped in an outhouse, another features lengthy digressions on the concept of “hobbledehoydom.” The standout “Northern” is simultaneously humorous and frightening, a ghost story about botched buttock surgery and a parade of gruesome spirit children set in a Swedish Hispanic community where the residents “joke about putting lingonberries in the ajis and the pico de gallos, but then we also do actually put them in there, and the truth is they work.” In his longest and best stories, Martinez mines both the small details and the large absurdities of life to show us our own strange world in a new way.
EVERYTHING IS AWFUL AND YOU’RE A TERRIBLE PERSON
By Daniel Zomparelli
201 pp. Arsenal Pulp, paper, $15.95.
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“YouTube is my career, O.K.? I needed to do that,” a character says, defending his choice to live-stream his breakup in Zomparelli’s aptly titled debut. These 32 vignettes and stories feature a cast of directionless, self-absorbed 20-somethings — almost entirely gay men in Canada — who loathe their lives and one another, and aren’t afraid to say it. “You know no one likes you here, right?” a co-worker tells a man who printed thousands of pages that say only “I feel weird.” Dates and sex are the main focus, with characters frequently referred to only by comical and anonymizing nicknames: “MuscGuy,” “what’s his face,” “Chillandlaidbackdude,” “Porn Beard.”
Written in flat, earnest prose reminiscent of the “Alt-Lit” movement, Zomparelli’s stories pull humor from the banalities of lives devoted to anonymous sex, cellphone apps and social media. After sneaking away from a disappointing one-night stand, that YouTube heartbreaker still posts “the selfie of us kissing” with the caption “Toronto Romance #love #lovewins.” A couple of stories whimsically stray from realism to literalize the characters’ feelings that they (or their dates) are monsters. A gay couple try an open relationship with a ghost ex, leading to misunderstandings when one buys a Ouija board: “He said that it was insulting to ghosts and that I was probably ‘ghost-racist.’” A current of melancholy flows beneath the mundanity and jokes, as when a character tries to describe what he wants in a relationship: “I’ve never figured that out, and that’s what scares me most.”
KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG
Fiction With a Nonfiction Coda
By Edie Meidav
214 pp. Sarabande, paper, $15.95.
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In certain literary corners, style may be a dirty word, but not in Meidav’s stylistically virtuosic collection. The author of three novels, Meidav favors long, looping sentences as full of life as her characters. After a dreamlike night with guitar-playing Spanish Gypsies, a wanderlusting girl in her “early 20s but making up for time lost to who knows what” finds “her insides sore but in a good way, a tiredness under her eyes carrying everyone else’s reportage though she no longer had to tote around the contours of herself.” Many of Meidav’s characters go on journeys, sometimes to escape brutal regimes, sometimes just to get away from it all. The collection also travels across time and place: a boxing star escaping post-revolutionary Cuba, a Jewish family in pre-war Poland, Guatemalan-American girls celebrating a quinceañera, an aging professor in a hot tub. In one of the best stories, a veteran in the South runs a hustle cramming people’s freezers full of beef — “before they say lickety and before they say split they find themselves whipping out a pen and writing out a checkaroo for 150 buckarupees” — but winds up bested by Northern carpetbaggers. The collection ends with a nonfiction coda that doesn’t decode or deepen the stories so much as rework some of their themes (youth and adventure, age and memory) in two thoughtful essays. If it feels unnecessary, it’s only because the short stories in this collection stand tall enough on their own.
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The Boy Who Became Joe Finder
This content was originally published by on 19 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Veteran thriller writer Finder was once a child of eight who wanted to write. Then the author Eleanor Cameron became his pen pal.
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PW Picks: Books of the Week, May 22, 2017
This content was originally published by on 19 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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This week: a wonderful biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, plus the controversial novel that inspired last year’s hit movie ‘Elle.’
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Baseball Player David Ortiz On Being ‘Big Papi’ : NPR
This content was originally published by on 19 May 2017 | 9:10 am.
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David Greene talks with legendary baseball player David Ortiz. His career includes three World Series wins with the Boston Red Sox. Ortiz retired in 2016 and is out with a new memoir.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
If our next guest’s career had a soundtrack, it might go pretty much like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Ortiz to right field, back goes Souza, looking up and it’s gone.
GREENE: David Ortiz hit 541 of those home runs during his two decades in the major leagues. Oh, yeah, he also won three World Series championships with the Boston Red Sox, and he became a legend in a city already known for sports legends. And there is that nickname – Big Papi.
DAVID ORTIZ: I used to call pretty much everybody Papi and, you know, they start Papi-ing (ph) me back (laughter).
GREENE: Ortiz actually called teammates Papi because he could never remember their first names. He does remember quite vividly in a new memoir some of the defining moments of his long career and also the childhood that defined him. In a neighborhood of the Dominican Republic, he says he had to survive, parents working hard to give him the chance at a different life. As for David Ortiz’s dreams…
You didn’t dream about being Babe Ruth. You dreamed about being Michael Jordan.
D. ORTIZ: That’s right. I grew up playing a lot of basketball, and Michael Jordan was the guy that everybody wanted to be. If it was because of me, I would be in, you know, like, more into the basketball than the baseball. But my dad, he figured that I had a good hand and nice coordination. And he encouraged me big time to follow up with the baseball game, so…
GREENE: Probably made a good choice, yeah. But in the beginning, you actually found baseball when you watched it on TV – kind of slow.
D. ORTIZ: Yeah, yeah. I – when I was a kid, I thought that sitting down to watch a baseball game was…
GREENE: Punishment (laughter).
D. ORTIZ: It was horrific. It was – it was not fun. When you’re a child and you are sitting down watching TV, you want to make sure that you get to be entertained. Otherwise, you want to be moving all over the place and doing things (laughter).
GREENE: When you arrived in the U.S., it’s the summer of 1994. I mean, you’re 18 years old. You’re in Arizona. You’re a rookie prospect for the Seattle Mariners. You don’t speak much English. Did you see a successful career, or were you like, where in the world am I?
D. ORTIZ: To be honest with you, I don’t even know what I was really doing because all you think about it was like – knowing that you left a family behind that are – it’s counting on you. So you had that pressure that you got to carry on your shoulder, but at the same time, you are so young that you don’t want to be thinking about it all the time. But I try my best. I give everything I have to do it.
GREENE: I want to jump ahead. It was October of 2004. Boston hadn’t won a World Series since 1918.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Just turned midnight here at Fenway Park. The Red Sox are three outs away from being swept.
GREENE: Down three games to none to the Yankees – no team had ever come back to win a series from that deficit. Did you have any hope that you were going to come back and beat the Yankees?
D. ORTIZ: Honestly no, especially after that last game that we lost. You know, I mean, they scored, like, 18 runs, and it seems like everything was going south for us. But all of a sudden, we won the first game. Here comes the second game, and we end up winning it. And now we have that good momentum going on, and the rest of the series is history.
GREENE: Can I just say how refreshing it is to hear an athlete be honest about giving up hope?
D. ORTIZ: (Laughter).
GREENE: Athletes always say, oh, no, we still have hope. We can – it’s one game at a time. We can win four games.
D. ORTIZ: No, no, no, no. If I tell you that, I’m lying to you.
GREENE: It’s hard to even decide what I want to hear you talk about because there are so many great moments in this book. But I think about you hitting that grand slam in game two against the Tigers in the League Championship Series. And the reason I ask about it is because that was 2013, and it was after the marathon bombing in Boston, which had to make that a very different kind of year in so many ways.
D. ORTIZ: I’ll tell you, that year was – it was like a movie. Being in New England, going through the marathon bombing, something that left a scar on all of us, winning the World Series that year was something that – I can’t even describe it. Making all those families that have family members that suffer that tragedy – I think it was a big release. It was a huge relief for all of them.
GREENE: Listening to you talk, it makes me want to ask you about the low points when your career took a turn and you wrote about when your name turned up on that list of players who had supposedly tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. Why do you think your name ended up on that list?
D. ORTIZ: I always ask myself the same question. This thing came out, and it was like my word against theirs. It made me very angry. You don’t accuse people just like that, especially someone that is having the career that I was having plus the town that I was playing for and all that I had accomplished in my career.
GREENE: And we should say, you wrote that you were a little careless back when you were buying supplements and vitamins over the counter but that you never used steroids. But can you see why fans, in cases where it was proven, why fans would be disappointed?
D. ORTIZ: Oh, definitely. When you hear that one of your players got caught using something that is not keeping everything at the same level than the others, you know, it kind of gets you thinking. You know, in my case, when I say that I was careless, I was just like any other athlete going to those places like GNC to buy supplements because it’s like you guys walking into an office. You need a cup of coffee to get yourself going. As an athlete, you need supplements. I mean, the workout and the stuff that we do, you need to have energy to get it done.
GREENE: You miss playing?
D. ORTIZ: I don’t miss playing. I think I had a long career, and every time you think about, oh, I think I can still play and then the pain pop up.
(LAUGHTER)
D. ORTIZ: Never mind (laughter).
GREENE: Do you still replay that moment when you retired and were at Fenway and your daughter surprised you and sang the national anthem at your last home opener?
D. ORTIZ: Yeah. That’s the one thing that I always go back to. You know, that little girl, she was in one of my arm 15 years before that, you know, and all of a sudden, you see your child out there, you know, performing. I was so nervous. I don’t think I had ever got that nervous, even when I play (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ALEXANDRA ORTIZ: (Singing) And the land of the free and the home of the brave.
GREENE: That is David Ortiz’s daughter, Alex, singing there the year he retired, 2016. Ortiz’s new book is called “Papi.”
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
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6 Tips for Creating Believable Characters That Win Over Readers
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 19 May 2017 | 3:30 pm.
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Persuasive characters keep a good story aloft and your readers involved. Whether you lean toward the literary, with prose that would make a cold-blooded insurance adjuster weep, or are creating your genre magnum opus—with rapping vampire detectives, drug-dealing Senators, and naked Kardashians racing to break the code to eternal youth without telemarketers—unless your characters are believable, very few readers will remain awake through the second explosion. Even if your book’s only living inhabitants are fire-breathing alien weasels, they need to be relatable fire-breathing alien weasels.
This guest post is by Grant Jarrett. Originally from northeastern Pennsylvania, Jarrett lived in Manhattan for twenty years before moving to Marin County, CA, where he now works as a writer, ghostwriter, editor, musician, and occasional songwriter. His publishing credits include numerous magazine articles, essays, short stories, and More Towels, his coming-of-age memoir about life on the road. His debut novel, Ways of Leaving, won the Best New Fiction category in the 2014 International Book Awards. The House That Made Me, his 2016 anthology about the meaning of home, was chosen as an Elle “Trust Us” book. Jarrett is an avid cyclist, skier, and surf skier.
So where do you find these characters? How do you make them breathe?
1. Observe the people around you.
Examine how they speak, how they behave, their tics and twitches, pauses and stutters, the phrases and movements they repeat. Notice, too, what they omit, how they sometimes express themselves without words, how they sometimes choose not to express themselves at all. That, too, can have meaning. Analyze what makes them distinctly them and use it. Steal from life; that’s what it’s there for.
2. People are multidimensional.
Their flaws and contradictions are what make them interesting (think Hitler and his apparent affection for his dogs). Without some humanizing, sometimes contradictory characteristics, or some deeper history, a villain becomes no more than a pale symbol, a cliché. Similarly, a perfect protagonist is little more than a cartoon, one-dimensional and as plausible as a moose on ice skates. Most people are neither heroes nor villains. They are more complex, more interesting, more like us. Endow your characters with flaws, faults, weaknesses. Allow your heroes to fail and your villains an occasional success (without electing them President, please). Create characters who are rich and complex, flawed and sometimes contradictory, and your readers will find the depth required to immerse themselves.
[The 5 Biggest Fiction Writing Mistakes (& How to Fix Them)]
3. Be compassionate, or at least empathetic toward your characters.
When writing, avoid passing judgment on even those characters who do terrible things. Your job is not to judge them, but to portray them honestly and accurately. Let readers see them clearly and draw their own conclusions. Let them find the truth. This search and discovery will keep them reading and caring and believing.
4. Individuality.
In my latest novel there are three main characters, very different from one another, with distinct voices and vastly disparate viewpoints. One is uneducated and crude, another has the bombastic verbosity of a wizard wannabe, and the third is an educated middle-American grade school teacher. Their voices are unmistakably their own. I did dozens of revisions in an attempt to ensure consistency and make each character more real, more alive. I am not suggesting that all the characters in your novel should possess quirky individual voices, strange dialects, and bizarre verbal tics, just that (unless you are David Mamet, in which case, why are you reading this and can you please send me money?) a five-year-old homeless child from Newark should not “sound” the same as a 65-year-old Oxford Professor of Pomposity from Wales.
5. Humanize your characters
Remember what we share, the aspects of being human that connect us, the needs and desires and joys and disappointments and hurts, the physical aches and pains, the self-doubt, the suspect motivations, the unexpected acts of kindness that define us. If you create characters that you care about, that you believe, characters who are real enough to make you laugh or cry or punch the wall in rage, your readers will believe and care. But don’t expect me to plaster your wall.
[Here Are 7 Reasons Writing a Novel Makes You a Badass]
6. Trust your characters.
When I hit a roadblock it’s often because I’m trying to force a character to do or say something he or she simply would not do or say. Knowing better than I do, they simply go on strike, demanding more credible working conditions. Of course people sometimes act in ways contradictory to what you know, or think you know, about them, but when they do it reveals something about who they are and alters your perception of them. If you bend them into unnatural positions without recognizing the consequences, your characters will cease to be compelling and believable. Rather than asking someone to perform duties clearly outside his or her job description, find someone more suited to murdering the psychotic haberdasher or stealing the tainted gherkins or seducing the wily blowfish or whatever is required to move your story forward. Or let the story lead you down an unexpected path.
Once you’ve laid the groundwork, given your characters life, and placed in their paths obstacles of substance, your story will begin to take on a life of its own, creating its own momentum. Be sensitive to the life that’s flourishing there; give it the opportunity to live and breathe, to enable the story and its players to move forward and forge new paths driven by the fictive world and beings you’ve put in place. If you allow that mysterious process to reveal its own special truth it may transport you to unexpected places and reveal to you a story even more compelling and true than the one you initially envisioned, surprising you and, more importantly, your readers. And you may find you don’t need those alien weasels.
Plot Versus Character is a hands-on guide to creating a well-rounded novel that embraces both of these crucial story components. In this book, you’ll learn to:
—Create layered characters by considering personality traits, natural attributes, and backgrounds
—Develop your character’s emotional journey and tie it to your plot’s inciting incident
—Construct a three-act story structure that can complement and sustain your character arc
—Expose character backstory in a manner that accentuates plot points
—Seamlessly intertwine plot and character to create a compelling page-turner filled with characters to whom readers can’t help but relate
—And much more
Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
Sign up for Brian’s free Writer’s Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
Listen to Brian on: The Writer’s Market Podcast
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Scots on the Rocks and Jo Nesbo’s Latest: The Best New Crime Fiction
This content was originally published by MARILYN STASIO on 19 May 2017 | 1:00 pm.
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Christoph Niemann
There’s no point waiting for Denise Mina’s two dependable series sleuths, Alex Morrow and Paddy Meehan, to appear in THE LONG DROP (Little, Brown, $26), which is a drastic departure from her brilliant contemporary studies of criminals who prey on Glasgow’s social underclass. This new novel takes its story from the Burnside murders, a true crime spree that horrified the city in the late 1950s. William Watt, the owner of a string of bakery shops, is innocent of the murder of his wife, his sister-in-law and his daughter, but although the police can’t prove otherwise, they’re convinced of his guilt. So Watt sets out to convince them that the real killer is Peter Manuel by — wait for it! — taking him out on a bender and jollying him into a confession.
Mina has always been a close observer of the brutality drunkards can inflict on their wives and children (“Between lunchtime closing and the pubs reopening for the evening, Glasgow is carpeted with drunk men. They loll on pavements,” wet themselves at bus stops, “fight invisible foes in the streets”). But she also feels for women like Manuel’s mother, Brigit (“My knees are broken with praying for you”), and the father of a murdered girl who describes her in the blandest of terms on the witness stand because he can’t bring himself to share his memories of the “real daughter” the public knows only as a mangled corpse. Mina even holds out her hand to those inarticulate thugs whose violent acts are a perverse way of validating their own lives. “‘You can’t tell a story,’” Watt says, dismissing his companion’s veiled threat over the course of their wild night, “not knowing that this is cutting Manuel to the bone.”
With one plotline continually hopscotching over the other, Mina manages to keep two narratives going at once: the farcical account of Watt and Manuel’s binge and the sober courtroom drama of dueling life-or-death stories when Manuel faces a jury. Despite the novel’s final reassurance that it’s “just a story. Just a creepy story about a serial killer,” this one feels painfully real.
♦
Jo Nesbo certainly has the magic touch when it comes to psycho serial killers. In THE THIRST (Knopf, $26.95), breathlessly translated by Neil Smith, the gloomy Norwegian novelist introduces a monster who stalks his victims on Tinder, rips out their throats with lethal dentures made of metal spikes and drinks their blood. When the killing starts, summer is over, with all its “hysterical, cheerful, stupid self-expression,” and Oslo has resumed its true character, “melancholic, reserved, efficient.” That also describes Nesbo’s protagonist, Harry Hole, “possibly the best, possibly the worst, but certainly the most mythologized murder detective” on the city’s police force.
Something about the killer’s bizarre M.O. strikes a memory chord with Harry, and at the scene of the second killing he gets down to work, scrutinizing the bloody evidence, reading the clues the madman has left for the police and coming to the unnerving conclusion that “he wants to play.” At this chilling point, teams of investigators are dispatched and the good citizens of Oslo are paralyzed with fear. But much of this melodrama is only a distraction from the intricate plotting that keeps the story shifting under our feet. Nesbo is a master at this narrative sleight of hand, and if you can stand the gory details and hang on during the switchback turns, the payoff is its own reward.
♦
One way to deliver a message in the unsettled political climate of 1919 Calcutta is to stuff it in the mouth of a murdered man. “English blood will run in the streets,” warns the note in Abir Mukherjee’s enthralling debut novel, A RISING MAN (Pegasus, $25.95). “Quit India!” Lord Charles Taggart, the police commissioner, assigns the case to Capt. Sam Wyndham, newly arrived from England with lingering war wounds and a morphine habit but a keen appreciation for the “vibrant, wretched beauty” of the slums of Calcutta. The investigation sends Wyndham and his Bengali assistant on a whirlwind circuit of the city. On his way to uncovering “a fully fledged terrorist campaign” against the Raj, Capt. Wyndham is educated in the ways that 150,000 Britons have managed to maintain mastery over millions of Indians.
♦
LOVE AND DEATH IN BURGUNDY (Minotaur, $24.99), Susan C. Shea’s novel set in the French countryside, offers a pleasant getaway from hard-core killers. Reigny-sur-Canne is an unspoiled village with only a crumbling castle to recommend it to tourists. Katherine Goff, an American artist of modest reputation and a likable enough amateur sleuth, has acquired an eclectic group of friends and potential murder victims (including a rich, rude American I’d like to murder myself). There are local fetes, excursions to colorful flea markets and the odd interesting character like Jeannette, a 14-year-old thief with personality. That might be enough for a respectable cozy mystery. Even so, this feels like something you’ve read before — the same characters, the same fetes, even the same recycled scenery.
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Understanding the White Evangelical Movement: PW Talks to Frances FitzGerald
This content was originally published by on 18 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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In her new book, ‘The Evangelicals,’ the historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist explores how millennials are changing the face of the evangelical movement.
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8 New Books We Recommend This Week
This content was originally published by on 18 May 2017 | 10:04 pm.
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THE DINNER PARTY: And Other Stories, by Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $26.) For some accomplished novelists, short stories are mere doodles, variations on themes better addressed at length. Not so for Ferris. Anxiety, self-consciousness and humiliation are the default inner states of the characters in these 11 stories, which are dynamic with speed yet rich with novelistic denseness. Ferris’s collection is a magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion.
STARTUP, by Doree Shafrir. (Little, Brown, $26.) Tech culture is the target of feminist satire in Shafrir’s biting and astute debut novel, peopled by clueless men in positions of power and women struggling for recognition and respect in a male-dominated world. Among the novel’s delightful sendups: mindfulness apps, detailed renditions of VC presentations, and MorningRave, a clean-living dance party to start the day.
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MY BEAUTIFUL BIRDS, written and illustrated by Suzanne Del Rizzo. (Pajama Press, $17.95; ages 6 to 10.) A Syrian boy tends pigeons on his roof until his family leaves for a refugee camp; he can barely speak until he begins painting his birds. This graceful, uplifting book relies on Del Rizzo’s stunningly dimensional clay art.
THE END OF THE WILD, by Nicole Helget. (Little, Brown, $16.99; ages 8 to 12.) A motherless girl named Fern, living in poverty and foraging to help feed her family, is challenged when fracking comes to her town — it damages the environment but might provide a much needed paycheck for her struggling stepfather. Helget’s beautifully written novel raises important questions that are grounded in Fern’s complicated choices.
YORK. Book 1: The Shadow Cipher, by Laura Ruby. (Walden Pond, $16.99; ages 8 to 12.) In Ruby’s captivating novel, the first in a series, precocious twins search for clues buried in the bones of a present-day, steam-punky New York. Their journey takes them around the city and into its past, both real and fantastical, with a crackling plot and laugh-out-loud humor.
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