Ruth Franklin’s most recent book is Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 2016. (May 2017)
“Usually I try to get patients to confront their families, but in your case I would recommend putting several thousand miles between you and them,” a therapist told Phillip Lopate in 1980. Along with his older brother and their two younger sisters, Lopate had spent his childhood in Brooklyn as …
Joyce Carol Oates is sometimes spoken of as a novelist of sensationalism, her Gothic and morbid tendencies emphasized. In fact, her new book, A Book of American Martyrs, is a deeply political novel, all the more powerful for its many ambiguities.
The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family
by Roger Cohen
In The Girl from Human Street, Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist whose previous books have investigated the stories of American POWs under the Nazis and the fate of four families in the former Yugoslavia, seeks to excavate the forces, both historical and personal, that shaped his own family.
One of the characters in Ghostwritten, David Mitchell’s first novel, is a “noncorpum”: a disembodied spirit that travels the earth as a parasite on its human hosts. Restlessly seeking a clue to its own origin, it scours their consciousnesses, assimilates their knowledge and experiences as its own, and then transmigrates …