Book Reviews

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is the kind of novel that reads like a page-turner while doing the work of serious literary fiction. Published in 2017 and set in Shaker Heights, Ohio – the carefully planned, deliberately integrated suburb where Ng grew up – it tells the story of two families whose collision exposes the…

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of the strangest and most beautiful objects in twentieth-century literature. Published in Italian in 1972 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974, it consists of 55 short prose pieces in which the explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to an aging Kublai Khan. The cities are not…

Summary Olive Kitteridge is a linked story collection published by Elizabeth Strout in 2008 that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. Its organizing figure, Olive Kitteridge herself, is a retired mathematics teacher in the small coastal Maine town of Crosby, and she is not, by any conventional measure, a likeable person. She…

Henry James published The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 and created what many critics consider the first fully modern novel in English. Its subject is a young American woman who comes to Europe with ideals about freedom and independence and discovers that freedom, when it arrives in the form of money, is not the…

Haruki Murakami published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Japanese in 1994-1995 and in English translation in 1997, and it announced something that his earlier novels had suggested: that he was capable of a sustained ambition that exceeded the charming, melancholic registers of Norwegian Wood and the playful surrealism of A Wild Sheep Chase. The novel…

Summary Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952, and it won the National Book Award that year, and it has not stopped being relevant. The novel follows an unnamed Black narrator from his humiliating graduation ceremony in a Southern town, where he is made to participate in a staged brawl before an audience of drunken…

Nella Larsen’s Passing is one of the most compressed and psychologically dense novels of the Harlem Renaissance. At 96 pages, it is barely a novella, yet it contains more sustained ambiguity than most novels five times its length. Published in 1929 and largely forgotten until the 1970s, when Black feminist scholars began the work of…

Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and the novel immediately named something that Americans and Europeans were still trying to understand about themselves: the damage that World War I had done to a generation’s sense of purpose, pleasure, and identity. The title comes from Ecclesiastes – “The sun also rises, and the…

Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in 2004 after ten years of writing, and the novel was recognized immediately as something extraordinary. It won the Hugo Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award and made its author, briefly, the most discussed debut novelist in English. Clarke had written a book that was simultaneously…

Ernest Hemingway finished A Farewell to Arms in 1929, writing and rewriting the ending dozens of times before he found the version that satisfied him – or rather, the version that satisfied him least badly. The novel is a war story and a love story, and in Hemingway’s telling those two things are not opposites…