Our 160th list (!) comes from Porter Shreve, whose latest novel, his fourth, is a splendid book about books that seems straight out of (or straight into?) Top Ten Land. The novelist Brock Clarke says it is “a remarkable novel about the huge promises fathers and sons, writers and readers, books and characters make to each other,” while the writer Antonya Nelson compares it Michael Cunningham’s homage to Virginia Woolf, The Hours.
Congratulations to a quartet of Top Ten contributors honored for their recent work.
George Saunders has been awarded the 10th annual Story Prize for his story collection Tenth of December. Andrea Barrett was a runner-up for her collection Archangel.
Alice Hoffman is receiving warm reviews for her The Museum of Extraordinary Things.
Reviewing the novel in the Boston Globe, Jan Stewart observes: “Alice Hoffman specializes in fairy tales for impressionable grown-ups and cautionary tales for precocious adolescents. Not infrequently, the two overlap.”
Top Ten contributor Susan Minot travels vast distances – whether measured by miles, experience or sensibility – for her first novel in more than a decade, Thirty Girls.
Writers are not like wine; most do not improve with age. For many, their first book is their best; others hit their height mid-career. The number who reach their peak – or rediscover it – in old age is vanishingly small.
Wally Lamb is back with an “ultra-contemporary novel” that deploys his gift for empathy to explore love, sadness, sexuality, ethnicity and art across two decades among a group of upper-middle class resident of Connecticut.
Top Ten contributor Paul Auster earns a rave from Sarah Manguso in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review.
Here’s the opening: “Writing multiple novels is generally considered a triumph, writing multiple memoirs a somewhat shameful habit. Still, I’ve never heard anyone sniff about Paul Auster’s autobiographical recidivism; perhaps his 16 acclaimed novels compensate for it. In any case, on the basis of his five memoirs alone, Auster should be recognized as one of the great American prose stylists of our time.
Literature allows us to enter another person’s mind. Often, it is the same one – the writer’s, refracted and bent through characters who, nevertheless, often have too much in common.
Roxana Robinson’s work is an effort to shatter the constraints of consciousness, bringing readers inside the head of radically different characters, from the artist Georgia O’Keeffe in a nonfiction biography to a young heroin addict and his parents in her 2008 novel, Cost.
Top Ten contributor Andrea Barrett is receiving strong reviews for her ninth book, an “elegant new story collection” titled Archangel.
John Freeman says the five interlaced stories feel “like a dispatch from the moving front of scientific discovery, [spanning] the wake of Darwin’s theory to the aftermath of Einstein’s discovery of relativity.”
