by Alice Munro
CRITIC'S CHOICE
One of Alice Munro's specialities is the short story with the long view. She sets characters in motion, then jumps ahead years or decades to show how their actions ripple through a lifetime. In "Tricks," part of her latest collection, a shy young nurse misreads a chance encounter, only to discover in old age that it was mistaken identity, rather than rejection, that set her on a path to small-town spinsterhood. "Passion" recounts a woman's return to the lake house where, 40 years earlier, she betrayed an eager young suitor with his doomed alcoholic brother. In "Trespasses," a birth mother suddenly appears years later to pry open the dark past of a teenager's adopted family. At the heart of the book are three linked stories that follow Juliet, a classics scholar turned television presenter, from her first love through late middle age. Desperate to understand why her grown daughter left for a cultish community, never to be heard from again, Juliet sifts through her own past looking for the failures of love or spiritual sustenance that drove the daughter away. Munro is wise in the ways of human emotion, and her stories are so rich in subplots, asides and ancillary characters that even a tale of less than 50 pages feels as rounded as a novel.
NOVEL
by Neil Jordan
In films like The Crying Game, director Jordan keeps audiences in his grip with the help of bold twists and clever turns. In his fourth novel, the Irishman who began his career as fiction writer neatly seduces readers with the first sentence. "I know exactly when I died," announces his narrator, a murder victim whose body was never found. Not only does Jordan give us a protagonist, Nina, who speaks from beyond the veil, but he lets her loose in time; she drifts from the present (1950, in Ireland) to the turn-of-the-century past and back again. A silent film star in her prime, her shade communes with herself as a little girl in one passage and watches her killer mislead police in the next. Jordan marshals a story as compelling as it is complex, infusing it with rolling Celtic cadences; his sentences surge with a rhythm as irresistible as the tidal currents of the River Boyne, which courses through the village where the story is set. Far from a filmmaker moonlighting as a fiction writer, he's a novelist at the top of his craft.
FICTION
by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Known to readers only as "Girl," the idealistic narrator of this follow-up to the 2002 bestseller The Nanny Diaries has landed her first job—at a feminist nonprofit where she's forced to file when what she really wants to do is change the world. With a few well-observed details, the authors communicate her righteous indignation—capturing that Kinko's-centric phase when you're sure everyone around you is an idiot for not seeing that you're a genius. Girl does get a break when Guy (yes, that's his name) hires her to bring feminist cred to his cosmetics company, but she continues to be miserable. Not in a funny, self-deprecating Bridget-Jonesy way, which would make it easy to listen to her going on about her banal troubles all day—instead, she's more like a character you'd want to escape if you met her at a party. Even if you agree with Girl's "life is unfair" rants, you'll probably find them—and this novel—somewhat tiresome.
MEMOIR
by Audrey Young, M.D.
In this keenly observed account of her first four years of training, Audrey young, M.D. ( now a staff internist at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center), brings something new to the making-of-a-doctor genre—a sense of humility. As a student in the mid-'90s, "intoxicated...with the idea of medical adventure," she works in rural hospitals in the Pacific Northwest and in Africa. Unfailingly sensitive to her patients—and to the cultures that shape their lives—she discovers the limits of her power as a physician without losing her sense of mission. In the U.S. she struggles to understand why patients who have near-fatal asthma attacks or diabetic crises ignore doctors' orders; in Swaziland she debates the "moral calculus" involved in testing for HIV in a country where an AIDS diagnosis can trigger suicide—but failing to test fuels the epidemic. A fine storyteller, she tempers pathos with the life-and-death scenes that ER junkies crave. This is one physician who appreciates the emotional complexity of her work—and isn't afraid to admit that healing is, above all, "a human act."
TRUE CRIME
by Ann Rule
He called his victims "litter," and for two decades the Green River Killer scattered the bodies of at least 48 young women along river-banks and byways near Seattle. That's the hometown of Rule, a cop turned true-crime writer who once worked with Ted Bundy at a suicide hotline and made him the subject of her 1980 bestseller The Stranger Beside Me. As it happens, Rule crossed paths with the Green River Killer as well. Chillingly, when Gary Ridgway, a 52-year-old truck painter, was finally arrested for the string of murders in 2001, she learned that he had attended her book signings. For Rule, the murders hit close to home. She often drove the busy highway near Seattle's airport where the killer hunted his prostitute victims, sometimes dumping their bodies just a mile from her house. Rule infuses her case study with a personally felt sense of urgency. Without it, this exhaustive procedural would collapse from the sheer weight of the material she amassed over 20-plus years. Though her profiles of dozens of investigators tend to blur, she sketches the uniformly short, sad lives of the victims with poignance. But her most riveting portrait is of Ridgway, whom she describes as "a harmless-looking little man" who brutalized his victims because, he said, "I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex." Evil doesn't get any more banal.
Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior
America's favorite reality couple is engrossed in this 1991 bestseller about an athlete who travels to Hawaii on a spiritual quest. Trista is new to the book, but Ryan has read it repeatedly and says it inspired him on his own Hawaiian quest, an October triathlon: "It's good in helping you build a foundation for a task. I like it a lot."
Alicia Keys Taking a cue, perhaps, from Bob Dylan (whose book of lyrics hit stores last month), Grammy winner Alicia Keys has written Tears for Water, a book containing lyrics from her albums and 27 poems from her private journals. Keys, 24, talks about her literary leanings.
HAVE YOU ALMAY WRITTEN POETRY? Yes, for a long time. Some of the poems in the book have been in existence since I was 15.... Some poems may have started out as song ideas, but I just continued to write randomly; I was just writing what I was feeling.
WHAT'S THE DIFFRENCE BETWEEN YOUR POEM AND SONG? The poetry is even more intense than the songs; you can feel the difference. A song is more structured. You have to make people understand what you're saying. Whereas the poetry is more free-form. You can dig down much deeper, because there are no rules.
ARE YOU INFLUENCED BY OTHER WRITER OR POETS? I like Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou. I remember the first time I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I had this great teacher who brought you through all the nuances that went deeper than the words. I remember being really in awe.
WHEN YOU WROTE THESE POEMS DID YOU INTEND TO PUBLISH THEM? Not exactly. This book challenged me to decide what I wanted to share because some of it was so personal. For a lot of them, I realized that since those times have passed, I was ready to share because I'd moved on. The poems are my lessons.
- Contributors:
- Lee Aitken,
- Steve Dougherty,
- Allison Adato,
- Michelle Green,
- Dan Millman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
