Cloudsplitter

Author	Pak Kyongni
ISBN	0710305087

Pak Kyongni (December 2, 1926 – May 5, 2008) was a prominent South Korean novelist. She was born in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province, and later lived in Wonju Gangwon Province. Pak made her literary debut in 1955, with Gyesan (계산, Calculations). She is, however, most well known for her 16-volume...

Author	Ha Jin
ISBN	1400075793

Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of...

Author	Heather McGowan
ISBN	0385501382

So Heather McGowan was my grad student professor at Brown in a creative writing class that I adored. I think she had a short story of the same character published in an anthology prior to the release of this novel.
Prepare yourself. She is a tough writer, and this was a crazy read. The narrator is this...

Author	Peter Manson
ISBN	1859332226

While some may love this type of poetry. I could not stand any of it. It is bits and pieces of verbiage thrown together to make an unintelligible, nonsequential babbling of thought. If you are concrete-sequential like me, skip it. While the author is taking segments of conversations and news around him...

Author	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0375707476

From the prodigiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love’s paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt...

Author	Joanna Scott
ISBN	0312421389

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls...

Author

Douglas Unger

My Original Notes (1997):

I didn't like this book at all. The author doesn't seem as polished as Willa Cather, Theresa Jordan, or even, Hope Williams Sykes. Depressing themes throughout the book without any redeeming qualities. I didn't connect with any of the characters. Didn't really want...

Author	Norman Rush
ISBN	0679738169

I started subscribing to the Paris Review this year. I know, kind of silly, since almost all of their stuff is online. But I like the short stories, often, and I like feeling the thickness of the pages when I read it outside. One thing I've picked up from the issues I've read is that there seem to be a lot of writers...

Author	Reynolds Price
ISBN	0743244990

For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short...

Author	Chaim Grade
ISBN	0394716477

There are three novellas in this book; I read the one titled "The Oath." The story is set in eastern Europe (Lithuania, Russia, Poland - the same village could have been any or all at different times) in the years of the Russian Revolution. A Jewish man is dying, leaving a wife and two children. On his deathbed,...

Author	Robert Stone
ISBN	0395901340

The stories collected in Bear and His Daughter span nearly thirty years - 1969 to the present - and they explore, acutely and powerfully, the humanity that unites us. In "Miserere," a widowed librarian with an unspeakable secret undertakes an unusual and grisly role in the anti-abortion crusade. "Under...

Author	Thomas Berger
ISBN	0316116009

Having loved Little Big Man and The Return of Little Big Man, I had high hopes that I would love all things by this author. Didn’t happen. I almost quit on this one altogether, but pressed on thinking it might turn into something substantial. Instead, it continued on in the same plodding way sans any real...

Author	Diane Johnson
ISBN	0452279585

Chloe Fowler is the most unliberated woman she knows: disarmingly delicate and pretty, and not averse to putting either attribute to its best use, married, young, and satisfied with her normal American life as wife and mother. Yet Chloe is about to be liberated from everything she has ever known—in...

Author

Ward Just

The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago.

So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest,...

Author	Bruce Olds
ISBN	0312420935

On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, leaving fifteen people dead. Viewed in the North as a saint of freedom and in the South as the devil incarnate, Brown was a visionary who not only foretold but made inevitable the bloody apocalypse of the Civil War. An intricate...

Author	Donald Barthelme
ISBN	1564784037

Simon, a middle-aged architect separated from his wife, is given the chance to live out a stereotypical male fantasy: freed from the travails of married life, he ends up living with three nubile lingerie models who use him as a sexual object.

Set in the 1980s, there's a further tension between...

Author	Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN	0452272696

At forty-two, Jerome Corcoran - "Corky" to his friends and associates - is by all appearances a successful real estate developer and broker, a city councilman with a promising future in local politics, a genuine ladies' man, and all-around great guy. His big house, fifteen-hundred-dollar suits,...

Author	Andrea Barrett
ISBN	0393323579

Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young...

Author	Lore Segal
ISBN	1595581510

The thirteen interrelated stories of Shakespeare’s Kitchen concern the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring six never-before-published pieces, Lore Segal’s stunning new book evolved from seven...

Author	Lydia Millet
ISBN	1593762526

Lions, rabbits, monkeys, pheasants—all have shared the spotlight and tabloid headlines with famous men and women. Sharon Stone’s husband’s run-in with a Komodo dragon, Thomas Edison’s filming of an elephant’s electrocution and David Hasselhoff’s dogwalker all find a home in Love...

Author	Susan Choi
ISBN	0060542225

Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, was published to remarkable critical acclaim. The New Yorker called it "an auspicious debut," and the Los Angeles Times touted it as "a novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness," naming it one of the ten best books of the year....

Author	Péter Esterházy
ISBN	0060501049

Harmonia Caelestis is the product of a decade of labour: a monumental, part-autobiographical family history. If Helping Verbs of the Heart was an homage to his mother, then this is a memorial to his father. It is actually two works in one. Book 1, "Numbered Sentences from the Life of the Esterházy Family",...

Author	Colson Whitehead
ISBN	0385498209

Colson Whitehead’s eagerly awaited and triumphantly acclaimed new novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist...

Author	Oscar Hijuelos
ISBN	0060927542

Hijuelos' novel tells the story of Mr. Ives, who was adopted from a foundling's home as a child. When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is very much a product of his time. He has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he is on his way to pursuing the typical American...