Fiction & Literature Book Reviews

Carlos Fuentes, the novelist and essayist, died Tuesday at the age of 83 in Mexico City. He foresaw ending his days there, much as the Peruvian poet César Vallejo prophesied that he would die in Paris, but we must imagine that Fuentes might have preferred to leave this plane in Providence or London or, yes, Paris, all places in which he had lived over the course of a long life. For, though proudly and definitively Mexican, Carlos Fuentes was always a bit of an outsider in his homeland. read more

The post-apocalyptic world Thomas Pryce so effectively renders in his debut novel Unnatural Selection may be rife with sun-seared cannibals and other assorted perils, but the former science teacher from Yonkers, N.Y., says, “There’s no more comfortable place for me to be than building a world in my own little room behind a computer.” read more

The starred Kirkus review praises Toni Morrison’s Homeas “deceptively rich,” without elaborating on the nature—or at the levels—of the deception. read more

Their paths should have been set. Two twin girls, two unterzakhn (Yiddish for “underthings”) are growing up in early 20^th-century New York on the Lower East Side, not quite in deep poverty but not exactly living privileged lives. read more