Author Carolyn Chute
Books
Author of the week: Carolyn Chute
Twenty-three years after she scored a surprise hit with The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute lives pretty much as she did when the book first appeared. Her latest book, The School on Heart’s Content Road, has just been published.
Book of the week: Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager
Jackie Wullschlager’s “outstanding” biography of Marc Chagall combines "psychological nuance with critical insight,” said Mark Archer in The Wall Street Journal.
Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon
What we get in Roads to Quoz, said Steve Weinberg in The Kansas City Star, is a series of excursions covering 16,000 miles over a three-year span, with an author full of "sharp intelligence,” fine phrasing, and “relentless curiosity.”
Novel of the week: Death With Interruptions by José Saramago
What would happen if "death takes a holiday" and no one died, asks José Saramago in his new satirical novel, Death With Interruptions.
Does anyone want a Bush memoir?
How critics feel about a possible book by the outgoing president
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton
When a collection of letters works as well as Words in Air, said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News, it’s like a novel about two people in which the author is God and the “narrative line is life itself.”
Book of the week: John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman
Philip Norman's book, Shout!, is one of the most “exuberant and revelatory” Beatles books ever written. To that record should now be added his recently published biography, John Lennon: The Life.
Novel of the week: The English Major by Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison’s “ribald,” “Zen-serious” new novel about a 60-ish former English teacher on a cross-country road trip will prove “utterly charming” to any graying dad, said Alan Cheuse in the Chicago Tribune.
Author of the week: Toni Morrison
Next week the world’s “pre-eminent African-American writer” will publish a novel that imagines an America before racial categories jelled, said Susanna Rustin in the London Guardian.
Also of interest ... in celebrities as authors
Influence by Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen; The Way I Am by Eminem; Don’t Mind If I Do by George Hamilton and William Stadiem; Pieces of My Heart by Robert J. Wagner with Scott Eyman
Remembering Michael Crichton
Critics reflect on the life of an author who wore many hats
Richard Dawkins vs. Harry Potter?
Why the author of 'The God Delusion' is writing a children's book
Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler by Brad Matsen
Brad Matsen’s “meticulously researched and crisply written” book draws new—and infuriating—conclusions about why the Titanic went down so quickly.
Book of the week: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang
Over the last three decades, 130 million Chinese have migrated from rural homes to the country's industrial belt. Leslie Chang traces the history of this migration through the story of Min, who leaves her village to find work on an assembly line in Dongguan, and the life she and other women find in China's factory towns.
