Okay, I’m just going to say this: I’m a notoriously likable person. I try to be kind. I try to do good. But in fiction, unlikeable characters fascinate me—their secretiveness, their single-minded energy, their shameless lies and utter selfishness. I’ve written Regency Romances featuring dark antagonists. I’ve written murder mysteries featuring—you know, murderers. (I’ve also written some literary novels about ordinary mortals.) I wouldn’t want to have a villain for a pal. But I sure like the freedom fiction gives me to get to know a few.
Getting a reader engaged with an unlikeable protagonist is a challenge to any novelist.
Moshfegh succeeds brilliantly here. Eileen is as unlikeable as they come, an angry, friendless young woman who hates herself and everyone else. She works in a reprehensible, small-town prison for juvenile offenders and shares a squalid house with her nasty father.
Suddenly, though, a lovely young woman joins the prison staff. To Eileen’s amazement, she befriends her. Within days, she also involves her in a violent crime. Does this sound grim? Repellant? It’s not.
Granted, Eileen isn’t a book to be read over lunch. But the protagonist is like no woman I’ve ever met in fiction (or, thankfully, anywhere else). Her voice is fresh, her anger invigorating, and the book gripping from top to tail.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
This book was a bestseller, and not only thanks to its clever plot.
The writing is terrific: sharp, fresh, witty, full of details that snag your attention. The characters are both quirky and fully dimensional. If you saw the movie but never read the book, please turn that around. I believe a novel is a film that unspools in your head: Your reading breathes life into the characters, your mind’s eye creates the action, the voice of the writer speaks inside you.
For me, a book has an intimacy a movie never can—and Flynn’s characters repay intimacy, even though it comes with a big side order of queasiness. Who exactly are these people? What have they done? The question gets more puzzling and urgent with each page.
THE ADDICTIVE No.1 BESTSELLER AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON OVER 20 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE THE BOOK THAT DEFINES PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
Who are you? What have we done to each other?
These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on…
My brief career as a mystery writer happened to coincide with my son’s years a preschooler. What luck!
Quietly bumping off imaginary people was the perfect complement to keeping calm with a screaming toddler. There’s a reason people read murder mysteries, and it isn’t because we can’t imagine ever wanting to kill someone. (My son survived.)
In this classic psychological thriller, Highsmith lets us know from the jump that her “talented” protagonist is a thief and a liar. Things go swiftly downhill from there, on their way to far worse crimes, but Highsmith’s prose and her pacing are so perfect, her voice so imperturbable, that I couldn’t possibly have closed the book. Not the first time I read it, and not the second, either.
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
One night, decades after I first read James’s suspenseful gem of a novel, the book suddenly came to mind.
For years, I’d been struggling with how to fit together two women whose voices had been haunting my head. Now, in a flash, I saw the parallels they offered to the characters in Aspern. A determined, none-too-scrupulous scholar (male, in James’s book), an elderly woman who’d had a secret affair with a celebrated man, the two living together in the ruins of a once-elegant home, and a cache of hoarded papers the scholar desperately wants…
I dissected Aspern chapter by chapter, then gently fitted my characters onto its skeleton. Voilà: Must Read Well. “We stand on the shoulders of giants,” writers sometimes say. Also, “Steal from the best.”
Korelitz’s protagonist, Jake Bonner, is the author of a fairly successful first novel. But that was years ago, and with the promise of that book as yet unfulfilled, he’s been miserably sinking out of view ever since.
By the time we meet him, he is desperate for another success. But you probably know all this, because The Plot itself was a huge bestseller. Korelitz lights the fuse for her story when Jake becomes a thief, stealing a nifty idea for a—well, see her title.
Would I want to meet Jake? Not especially. But as fictional company, he and the small cast of vivid characters that collect around him in this tightly plotted book are a pleasure to know.
** NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ** The Tonight Show Summer Reads Winner ** A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 **
"Insanely readable." ―Stephen King
Hailed as "breathtakingly suspenseful," Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a propulsive read about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student,…
Narrated by Liz Miller, a penniless Ph.D. candidate desperate to finish her dissertation, the novel begins when Liz's boyfriend abruptly ditches her, rendering Liz homeless. She stumbles across a Craigslist posting: a room with a view in a pre-war Greenwich Village apartment. The rent is a pittance, but in exchange, the tenant must be willing to read aloud daily to the apartment's sight-impaired landlady.
Liz quickly figures out that the sight-impaired landlady is none other than Anne Taussig Weil, author of the 1965 international blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark and the very woman whose refusal to cooperate for the past four years has held up Liz's dissertation on the feminist works of mid-century women novelists. Access to Weil is the key to getting her academic career back on track.
He’s riddled with guilt. She’s annoyed with the status quo.
The death of a crime boss’s daughter forces Detective Neil Caldera to leave NYC. He seeks refuge in the tranquil embrace of a small town, where he finds himself entangled in the labyrinth of a teenage girl’s murder. Tess Fleishman’s pale skin and extreme weight loss portrays a disease she wants others to see. While inside, a compulsion for Neil fuels her passion to have him or destroy him.
He's riddled with guilt. She's annoyed with the status quo. The death of a crime boss's daughter forces Detective Neil Caldera to leave NYC. He seeks refuge in the tranquil embrace of a small town, where he finds himself entangled in the labyrinth of a teenage girl's murder. Tess Fleishman's pale skin and extreme weight loss portrays a disease she wants others to see. While inside, a compulsion for Neil fuels her passion to have him or destroy him. As Neil delves into the heart of the town's secrets, will truth deliver solace? Or will Tess prevail?
