Heller McAlpin
Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
-
Powers climbs down from the treetops of The Overstory in his latest novel, to tell the story of a widowed father and his troubled son who head into the wilderness to try to figure out their lives.
-
Author Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, tackles the ups and downs of a long, not always happy marriage in her excellently named new story collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.
-
Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows two women, college friends now on the cusp of 30, as they struggle to live and find meaning in a world that's become increasingly unlivable on many levels.
-
James Rebanks' new book Pastoral Song urgently conveys how the drive for cheap, mass-produced food has impoverished both small farmers and the soil, threatening humanity's future.
-
Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code, is back with her third book in five years — in which the connection with her longtime, close-knit female friends features prominently.
-
Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel — which she wrote in Italian, then translated back to English herself — centers on a middle-aged Italian woman trying to figure out her place in the world.
-
Elizabeth McCracken's new story collection dazzles with verbal flexibility, insight and feeling, capturing the oddities and mixed bags, the loves and losses that make up most people's lives.
-
Haruki Murakami's plain-spoken new story collection features narrators a lot like him — male, middle-aged, recounting inexplicably strange things that have happened to them,
-
Patricia Lockwood's first novel follows an Extremely Online woman whose life changes forever when her niece is born with a serious illness — which sounds Hallmark-ready, but Lockwood pulls it off.
-
A new book by Suleika Jaouad, author of the column "Life, Interrupted," encompasses a less familiar tale of what it's like to survive cancer and have to figure out how to live again in its aftermath.