How do we share history after it has already been claimed? That is the question at the heart of Ed Park’s latest novel. A fiction finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Same Bed Different Dreams is a riveting, revisionist take on Korean and American history—or at least what is assumed to be Korean and American history. The reconstruction of history from 1919 to the contemporary era, with multiple characters intersecting through parallel timelines, propels the head-spinning momentum of the book, centered on the true but stealth, ghostlike existence of […]

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Steve Almond is one of the few writers whose books I await with genuine impatience, and his newest was no exception. I read Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories (Zando; $18) in a few fervid sittings, underlining passage after passage, Almond’s characteristic wisdom and wry sense of humor wholly present in each of the book’s four sections. Truth Is the Arrow is an addictive blend of fiction-writing craft essays, writing prompts, and poignant reflections on the challenges and felicities of making a life as a writer. Almond is also the […]

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I met Sarah Tomlinson last year in Los Angeles at a book event for a mutual friend. It was an unseasonably cool night, but spirits were high—our friend’s book was doing well, and it was almost summer. After the reading, Sarah and I had a long, discursive conversation about film, TV shows, and books. During our chat, I learned that after working as a music critic in Boston, Sarah had moved to Southern California in the mid-aughts and transitioned to ghostwriting. She has published more than twenty books as a ghostwriter, and has also written a memoir, Good Girl (2015), […]

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In her suspenseful and thought-provoking new novel, Afterword, Nina Schuyler’s characters struggle to know themselves even as they push technology to the edge of human understanding. A brilliant mathematician, Virginia Samson has spent her life painstakingly re-creating her great love, Haru, in the form of an AI. Into this advanced technology she’s built Haru’s voice, memories, and intellectual curiosity. But while she had hoped to spend the rest of her days companionably discussing math with Haru, their interactions soon force Virginia to confront how much she has never understood about Haru, and about herself. Schuyler, who lives in the Bay […]

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In her debut novel, Burst, Mary Otis traces the tumultuous lives and conflicted bond of a mother and daughter navigating the world without a robust community or safety net: they are “alone but together.” Charlotte’s eccentric, sometimes erratic behavior both enchants and repels her daughter, Viva, who seeks structure and security through a single-minded dedication to her passion for dance. But this mother-daughter duo is more alike—and more connected—than they can sometimes understand, and Otis locates the poignancy of their parallel lives with insight and compassion. Moving seamlessly between perspectives and over years, Burst elegantly examines the complexity of this […]

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