Maud Newton is a writer, editor and blogger.
Recent Stories
For a half-century, the literary journal's interviews, under the banner "The Art of Fiction," have unlocked the mysteries of writing and the eccentricities of writers. Critic Maud Newton reviews a new boxed set, The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes I-IV.
In his wide-ranging, expertly curated anthology Becoming Americans, Ilan Stavans collects four centuries of immigrants' stories.
Gabriel hasn't spoken to his father since the senior writer's review proclaiming his son's first book a failure. When impending heart surgery reunites the men, generational tensions surface along with WWII-era intrigue in Juan Gabriel Vasquez's inventive and intricately plotted The Informers.
Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love makes an engaging case for raw attraction — where lust, emotion and intellect converge. Feminism, Nehring argues, has given us innumerable opportunities. Now how about the right to be romantic?
Assistant to a celebrity painter, whom she also sleeps with, Emma has stopped making her own art. Written by Jeff Koons' former assistant, The American Painter Emma Dial is a riveting inquiry into the creative impulse and a knowing portrait of the art world.
Although her past works have focused on lesbian themes, class anxiety is the animating force behind Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, a chilling and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II.
Sudanese author Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North is an engaging and complicated novel about two men who leave Africa to study in England and afterward belong in neither place. The novel has become a classic of postcolonial literature.
Among the previously unpublished writings left behind at Twain's death were squibs, rants and unfinished essays that capture the folksy icon's furious but often repressed compulsion to tell the world what he really thought of its tedious platitudes and received wisdom.
Frederick Barthelme's novel Waveland parallels the fate of the town it was named for, which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It's about loss — of property, love and family — but also about starting over and, just maybe, building something better this time.
It's Kafka meets Stephen King and The Three Stooges in this tale of a young man unwillingly inducted by psychotic clowns into a lethal circus act. Will Elliott's The Pilo Family Circus is a gripping psychological satire.
In its painstaking honesty, Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor is both a gift and a curse to O'Connor's fans, displaying as it does the racial insensitivity and other flaws of one of America's greatest short-story writers.
Kitty Burns Florey's history of penmanship is definitely not an exercise in hand-wringing about handwriting. Her engaging exploration is filtered through her own obsession with handwriting as an act of self-expression.
If his 13 children didn't give Mr. Ahuja plenty to worry about, his career presiding over development in sprawling Delhi is also in trouble. Karan Mahajan's highly entertaining debut novel, Family Planning, shows a rare level of concision, insight and humor.
