Like many people, I encountered Roddy Doyle through the Barrytown trilogy – The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van—three terrific novels, and later movies, set in the same fictional working class neighborhood of Dublin, novels that do things with dialogue I hadn’t thought possible. His newest, The Guts, revisits Jimmy Rabbitte – founder of The … Continue reading »

 Sara Paretsky is best known for a series of crime novels featuring the first great woman private eye, V.I. Warshawski. Paretsky is also the founder of Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women crime writers, as well as a foundation to encourage women in the sciences. Critical Mass, her latest V.I. Warshawski, draws on … Continue reading »

 Kevin Baker is celebrated for his journalism and his historical fiction, a genre that gets a bad rap as a kind of lesser literature. But isn’t all fiction historical fiction, with an obligation to effectively render details of time and place? The place that concerns him is New York City, and he ranges across its … Continue reading »

 It is silly to ask a novelist what her books are about, but Meg Wolitzer once wrote, “Sometimes they’re about marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children.” That pretty much covers what it is to be human. Omitting only handguns. We admire her deftness with language, in her fiction and also: she devises crossword puzzles. If … Continue reading »

  I first encountered her work in 1988, when my then-wife was captivated by The Greenlanders. We’d both just read Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundson and were susceptible to things polar. My favorite remains A Thousand Acres, but I’m proud to live in a country where I needn’t choose between them.  Person: Marguerite of Navarre … Continue reading »