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Three recent favorites from the author's shelves.
Former publishing insider Chris Pavone's first novel, The Expats, is a tale of espionage and intrigue in which a young mother's past catches up with her while she's living abroad in Luxembourg. This week, Pavone shares his three favorite books from the last year.
By Philip Hensher
"I simply love Hensher's sentences, one after another, filled with beauty and insight and humor and honesty. This novel sprawls out from the disturbing but dubious event at its center, engulfing a fascinating cast of characters across a broad spectrum of society, painting an infinitely detailed, heavily populated canvas, like a tremendous Renaissance fresco of contemporary England."
By Chad Harbach
"It has a baseball title, and baseball indeed occurs, but this is much more a campus coming-of-age novel -- coming of multiple ages, actually, from a variety of vantages, richly indulgent in character and language, in allusion and metaphor, almost painfully poignant, and altogether wonderful."
By David Foster Wallace
"Sometimes DFW didn't even need to write a full sentence to make me laugh out loud, and that's as true in this incomplete novel, cobbled together posthumously, as it was across his fully realized works. This is also a frighteningly perceptive and deeply empathetic book about, of all things, that universal soul-crusher, boredom."
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This emotionally taut novel of family dynamics and the limits of sacrifice presents a woman on the verge of giving up everything -- including her marriage -- to help her impassive brother fight his obesity.
A newly fired 20-something becomes an assistant to a filmmaker chronicling people’s failed ambitions in Alina Simone's sharp meditation on internet addiction, celebrity worship, and digital narcissism.
This new collection of some of the best of overseas reportage includes articles from Joan Didion, Tim Judah and Susan Sontag, with topics ranging from impromptu theater in conflict-ridden Sarajevo to a gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool.
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