Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not.
For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Those arguments also ignored our common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences, which unite us, regardless of where we live. I wanted to show that the places of American fiction can’t be divided into blue or red states.
She needed a distraction, so she turned, as she often does, to video games. But when she tried to play the adventure game Gold Rush, she discovered that the version she had played obsessively as a kid no longer existed. It felt like a chapter of her childhood had been erased. “This part of my life was gone,” she said.
The feeling of loss yielded a kernel of an idea, which Zevin jotted in a notebook: “Story of two game designers. The games they make are their lives."
At the book’s unlikely heart is a 1,000-pound manatee living in a once-famous South Florida aquarium housed in an old Danish warship. Jones’ fast-paced narrative presents an endearingly looney cast of characters: a vicious Florida retiree, a group of pot-smoking older ladies, a desperate (and desperately loving) mother, a mysteriously dead grandmother and a rebellious tech-savvy teen.
When you come to the end of Abraham Verghese's new novel, "The Covenant of Water," you will feel as if you have lived among its Indian and Anglo-Indian characters for almost a century. It's that long.
But it's also that immersive — appropriately enough for a book so steeped in the medium and metaphor of water, as the title suggests.
There’s so much to know about any one creature in our world, and even more to know about how creatures interact with their environment and one another. Bring into that mix the apex human animal, with all our history, science, politics and behaviors, and the story gets more fascinating yet.
Writer and photographer Tom Walker, with his lifetime of close observation of the natural world and the lives of animals, has written a remarkable new book that tracks a single wolf as it wandered through northern Alaska for 3,000 miles, driven by its need to eat, escape danger, and find a mate. That Walker didn’t literally climb mountains and ford rivers to do this makes the story no less interesting.
Rain comes back to the East River,
never the same river