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DANA KLETTER

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Holy roller

Marilynne Robinson’s Home
Marilynne Robinson’s Home is haunted.

By: DANA KLETTER | September 09, 2008

Common ground

Ann Patchett’s Boston allegory
Like the American naturalists of the last century, Ann Patchett examines race and class in her new novel, Run .

By: DANA KLETTER | September 18, 2007

After the Gold Rush

Michael Ondaatje’s memory plays
Michael Ondaatje builds his new novel, Divisadero , around a triad of characters.

By: DANA KLETTER | May 29, 2007

Death becomes him

Nathan Englander returns . . . at last
The combination of a gift for narrative, a proclivity for pathos, and a lode of arcane knowledge is put to great use in Nathan Englander’s first novel.

By: DANA KLETTER | April 23, 2007

Engine of dreams

Tatyana Tolstaya lives up to her name
Reviews of Tatyana Tolstaya are stuffed with adjectives that strain to capture the vigorous joy of her prose or the terrible engine of her imagery.

By: DANA KLETTER | April 10, 2007

Éminence grise

Joe Boyd remembers; remembering Joe Boyd
When I first met Joe Boyd, I knew him only as a legend, the force behind the psychedelic and folk-rock movements of the 1960s.

By: DANA KLETTER | March 27, 2007

Holy relics

Aharon Appelfeld revisits familiar terrain
Aharon Appelfeld’s parabolical novel All Whom I Have Loved tells of a boy’s loss of home and family.

By: DANA KLETTER | February 20, 2007

Fascist dreams

Leslie Epstein’s grand — and comic — opera
Leslie Epstein opens his panoramic new novel with a cast of thousands assembled to watch the conquered Ethiopians paraded through Rome.

By: DANA KLETTER | October 31, 2006

Edna O’Brien’s mother-daughter tale
The Light of Evening , Edna O’Brien’s most autobiographical novel yet, depicts the struggle between a mother and daughter to sever the unbearable bond that conjoins them and the love and guilt that makes total separation impossible.

By: DANA KLETTER | October 10, 2006

Another family, another island

Heidi Pitlor’s many birthdays
Heidi Pitlor’s debut novel, as the plural title suggests, is about more than just one person’s significant day.

By: DANA KLETTER | August 17, 2006

Grief work

A brother’s memoir
The myth of Icarus is central to Ken Dornstein’s memoir.

By: DANA KLETTER | July 24, 2006

Tripping

Travel guides that go beyond the practical
A handful of this year’s travel books seem an odd, almost ghoulish enactment of Rene Descartes’s statement that “Traveling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.”

By: DANA KLETTER | June 21, 2006

Sweet slob

Gary Shteyngart’s satirical mash-up
Absurdistan , an amplified Slavomerican mash-up of a novel, begs for a hyperbolic descriptive sentence to express its catch-all style.

By: DANA KLETTER | May 17, 2006

Med noir

The bloody Continental take on an American genre
It all starts with murder.

By: DANA KLETTER | April 27, 2006

Texas highs and lows

Gail Caldwell looks back
Anyone who’s listened to a homesick Texan sing the high lonesome song of longing for the Lone Star State will recognize the tune of Gail Caldwell’s memoir, A Strong West Wind .

By: DANA KLETTER | March 27, 2006

Fraud and fortune

Allegra Goodman’s Intuition
Allegra Goodman sets her latest novel, Intuition , in a long-ago, rent-controlled Cambridge.

By: DANA KLETTER | February 28, 2006

Hello to all that

Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George
In a time of tenuous allegiances and deep culture clashes, Julian Barnes’s new novel asks, "What does it mean to be included, to be excluded?”

By: DANA KLETTER | January 25, 2006

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