This book brings a set of complicated facts and emotions to our #MeToo moment. “They are the outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions.” Before the Soviet invasion of 1979, he adds, Afghanistan was peaceful and stable for decades. In her first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God” (1995), which contains extraordinary writing about ballet, a man emigrates from China to Panama. In a novel about loss and the loneliness of writing and imagination, Sigrid Nunez creates an irresistible tale of love and an unforgettable Great Dane. One of the central questions of the novel is whether Celestial is able do this – and what might happen if she refuses. By turns wry and earnest, Hisham tells the story of how two of his childhood friends from Raqqa became rebel fighters, and how he became a journalist. This novel is very quiet, clean and smells better than anything I’ve read: wood and varnish, leaves, coffee and salt. Nunez deals these out deftly; they do not jam her flow. In her apocalyptic novel “Salvation City” (2010), about a plague, a family has a basset hound named Sadie. My heat came from a small wood-burning stove, and keeping the tiny house at the right temperature, it turned out, required the same kind of constant low-level attention as my Twitter feed. Gun Love (Jennifer Clement), a neon fairytale about a girl raised in a Florida trailer park is full of topical issues: gun trafficking, veterans with PTSD, a megachurch pastor on the make. Many of the ostensibly “addicted” social media users are always working, trapped at our desks or in our cars, eyeing our phones, perpetually on call. But it is there: take historian Kevin Kruse, for example, who translates long books and complex research into quick, easy-to-share Twitter threads. The image of his mobile app icons shaking as he tries to quickly delete it is impossible to forget. Perhaps. Suicide, 3D-printed guns, mass incarceration, opioid addiction, class struggle, vulnerable young men spinning out of control: this year’s stack of prize-winning fiction wouldn’t make good beach reading material. The most illuminating perspective on social media came from one of the non-fiction books: Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War (Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple). She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Early in Sigrid Nunez’s novel, “The Friend,” a group of writers gather at a memorial for a well-known novelist who has committed suicide. Twitter might be more essential to Hisham than most – among other things, it’s how he met Crabapple, an iconoclastic artist and journalist, and his collaborator on Brothers of the Gun – but he’s far from enamored with it. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Friend: A Novel at Amazon.com. As his boat leaves the dock, his dog, which has been brought to see him off, releases an unearthly howl. “I am very good at reading,” I replied with dignity. 7 Nov 2020 ... "Later-life crises plead for fair treatment in Sigrid Nunez’s novel of profound introspection" ... Nunez's last novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award. The only thing I read twice: The short story that opens Heads of the Colored People (Nafissa Thompson-Spires) is a 14-page deconstruction of the public reaction after a police shooting. This is Quammen’s 15th book, and he writes like the director of a summer blockbuster: blasts of rich detail, quick cuts, not a second wasted. Generational trauma is also explored in There There (Tommy Orange), a kaleidoscopic novel about self-described “Urban Indians” in Oakland. Healing doesn’t get much narrative respect, even though it’s a long, dramatic process, full of tension and reversal. The dog, an enormous great dane named Apollo, becomes a focus for the narrator’s love and grief. Sigrid Nunez, 2011 These are dark days for aging male seducers, particularly those plying their trade as writing professors. Best writing: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, by David Quammen, explains crucial advances in the field of molecular phylogenetics, including the discovery of archaea, a whole new category of life. She is on the faculty of … There is a bit of drama. By Sigrid Nunez Reading Sigrid Nunez’s absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a … It made me less lonely to hear it in the background: the mutter of the kindling, the sigh as a log caught, the little coughs, then quiet, as it burned down into ash. But with The Friend, Nunez provides evidence that, for now, it survives * New York Times Book Review * In crystalline prose, Nunez creates an impressively controlled portrait of the 'exhaustion of mourning' * New Yorker * Her students are doctrinaire. When I finished the last page, I looked up. A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. 5.00 out of 5. The comedy here writes itself. She uses public records and old family letters to track how often the women in her family moved or were forced to move, seeking new jobs, better opportunities, an escape from violent men. “The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come,” Orange writes in a historical prologue pointing out that the massacres and displacement of Native people hasn’t stopped: “Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”. But it did provide a very different perspective from the news. 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