About a third of the way into this book, I wanted to hurl it across the room. But I didn’t because Harrison Scott Key’s voice was too funny for me to stop reading. I’m glad I did because two-thirds of the way into this book, I found myself full of hope.
By the final third, I was ready to hurl it again, but I desperately wanted to find out what happened to these two strangers whose marriage seemed like the greatest tragicomedy I’d heard in a long time.
Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, tells the shocking, "shot through with sharp humor" (The Washington Post), spiritually profound story of his journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.
One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife-the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman "who's spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church"-is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking events in How to Stay Married, casting our narrator onto "the factory floor of hell," where his wife was…
I had just gone back to Rome last summer and so when I stumbled across Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest short story collection centered around my newly favorite ancient city, I couldn’t resist.
I feel the same way about this book as I do about the city of Rome: not exactly easy or breezy, but deeply moving in a way that is hard to explain or verbalize. The stories, like the Italian town, drew me in slowly and surely, and I never knew quite what to expect next—my favorite feeling when it comes to both travel and books.
'Stimulating, elegant, distinctive and thought-provoking' The Sunday Times
From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. In these short stories Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city of Rome, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.
A man recalls a summer party that awakens an alternative version of himself. A couple haunted by a tragic loss return to seek consolation. An outsider family is pushed out of the block in which they hoped to settle. A set of steps in…
I was enthralled with Jean Hanff Horelitz ever since Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant's HBO mini-series introduced me to her previous book, so this book was on my TBD for a long time before I finally got around to reading it during a Mediterranean cruise this past July. On a cruise ship, there is always enormous competition for a person’s time/attention, but The Latecomer was good enough to keep me in my interior cabin for long stretches on sea days.
I could’ve been eating at one of the ship’s many restaurants, shopping during the interminable sales, or tanning poolside. Instead, I found myself turning page after page, desperate to find out what would happen to this dysfunctional family.
*A New York Times Notable Book of 2022* *A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction* *An NPR Best Book of the Year*
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.
The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF.…
Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of worldwide dominion. But when his latest solo single accidentally drudges up ancient rivalries between East Asia’s three superpowers, he suddenly finds himself canceled by the group’s notorious fandom known as much for their commitment as their obsession.
Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of an American psychologist he meets in an Angeleno H-Mart. Meanwhile, what no one foresees is that Duri’s cancellation catapults a spiral of increasingly violent interactions between his band and the public that ultimately culminates in an award show bombing whose reverberations forever alter both the fates of the members themselves and the nature of the music industry.
My kid is at that in-between age where he is too old for board books and many picture books but too young for longer chapter books with no pictures, so this graphic novel/comic book was the perfect holdover.
When I ask him why he loves it, he says it’s because it’s funny how these two brothers are always pretending to be superheroes.
Lincoln and Hudson Dupre are brothers with what grown-ups call "active imaginations". Link and Hud hunt for yetis in the Himalayas and battle orcs on epic quests. Unfortunately, their imaginary adventures wreak havoc in their real world. Dr. and Mrs. Dupre have tried every babysitter in the neighbourhood and are at their wits' end.
Enter Ms Joyce. Strict and old-fashioned, she proves to be a formidable adversary. The boys don't like her or her rules and decide she's got to go. Through a series of escalating events-told as high-action comic panel sequences-the brothers conspire to undermine Ms Joyce and get…
This book is for an older crowd, but it’s also like a Pixar movie, where there is something for everyone. It’s one of the few stories that is as rewarding for parents to read out loud as it is for the child audience it’s geared towards.
In my child’s words: “It’s so funny when the vacuum sucks up the squirrel, it turns into a superhero.”
Holy unanticipated occurrences! A cynic meets an unlikely superhero in a genre-breaking new novel by a master storyteller.
It begins, as the best superhero stories do, with a tragic accident that has unexpected consequences. The squirrel never saw it coming - the vacuum cleaner, that is. As for self-described cynic Flora Belle Buckman, she has read every issue of the comic book Terrible Things Can Happen to You! so she is just the right person to step in and save him. What neither can predict is that Ulysses (the squirrel) has been born anew, with powers of strength, flight and…
We discovered this book at a Little Free Library and were pleasantly surprised by how historically researched it was while also being a time-traveling book about a beloved dog.
Per my child, he loved the fact that Ranger is a time-traveler that can go back in time super fast—in this case, to the pre-Civil War era to help a pair of siblings escape slavery.
Ranger, the time-traveling golden retriever, is back for the third book in Kate Messner's new chapter book series. This time, he helps two kids navigate the Underground Railroad!
Ranger is a time-traveling golden retriever with search-and-rescue training. In this adventure, he goes to a Maryland plantation during the days of American slavery, where he meets a young girl named Sarah. When she learns that the owner has plans to sell her little brother, Jesse, to a plantation in the Deep South, it means they could be separated forever. Sarah takes their future into her own hands and decides there's only…
