by Michael Malone
By Michael Malone The jacket copy on There There begins, “Fierce, angry, funny, heartbreaking,” and that’s an apt description of Tommy Orange’s debut novel. It tells the stories of a dozen indigenous people who are headed to an event called the Big
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By Michael Malone “Gonzo Girl” is about a recent college grad named Alley who, desperate to make it in publishing, takes a job as an assistant to a big-name but extremely difficult author. The author is named Walker Reade, and he
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By Michael Malone Fredrik Backman’s “Anxious People” is set at an apartment showing outside of Stockholm. Eight strangers are checking out the top-floor flat, which has a nice view of a bridge, when a person with a gun bursts in. There was
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By Michael Malone I break from my usual novel reviews to examine a timely non-fiction release, as Patty Lin’s “End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood” tells the story of a thriving TV writer who quits the business before it swallows
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By Michael Malone “Scorched Grace,” a 2023 novel from Margot Douaihy, centers on Sister Holiday, a nun doing her thing down in New Orleans. Sister Holiday is not a typical nun, because there is a good chance you would not
Read MoreBy Michael Malone “Horse” is a big, bold, ambitious novel about a horse that lived a long time ago, but left enough of a mark on society that people are still studying him, analyzing him, writing books about him and admiring
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By Michael Malone The Mosquito Coast is a look at a family that departs the U.S., their headstrong father fed up with America and its materialism and relocates to the Honduran jungle. Father Allie Fox is headstrong and brilliant, and a
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Colson Whitehead takes us back to Harlem in the ‘70s with “Crook Manifesto,” which came out last week. There are three parts to the novel, each roughly 100 pages. The main character is Ray Carney, who owns a
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Delia Owens, author of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” was on page one of The New York Times in recent days, but the story had nothing to do with her smash novel. Well before the book’s 2018 publication, Delia
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I’ve had some serious Cormac McCarthy issues for a long, long time. McCarthy, who died last month, is widely considered one of the greatest American authors. A couple decades ago, I picked up his 1985 novel “Blood Meridian,” which The New
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