Given the earthquake of interest in the finale of HBOs Sex and the City—to say nothing of the sales of books like Bridget Joness Diary and The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right—it is no wonder that... Read More

The year is 1870. The backdrops are the Franco-Prussian War and the nascent Westernization of Japan. These worlds are linked by a piece of paper used to wrap a handmade Japanese ceramic bowl exported to France; the wrapping is actually... Read More

It can be an odd thing when reading fiction to encounter a likable story about unlikable people, and more peculiar still to come across a collection that consists almost entirely of such pieces. This cycle of twelve interrelated stories... Read More

Veronica Bailey is a woman who lives her life by the rules: as a bank vice president with designs on the top job, she understands that image is everything. She wears the right clothes, dates the right men, and never lets her personal... Read More

Even people who don’t really like poetry have a favorite E.E. Cummings poem. Playful, idiosyncratic, and iconoclastically original, Cummings is unique, his work perhaps the most instantly recognized of all American poetry. Yet as this... Read More

Asher’s name “sounds like the name of a dying thing,” declares his future love at their introduction. On the contrary, the title character of this novel is very much alive, though by story’s end he is intimately familiar with... Read More

In this twist on a nineteenth-century version of the three little pigs story, Mama Pig notices that her children have grown too big for their cave. She tells Tommy he must leave, and stuffs a wheelbarrow with items he’ll need for the... Read More

In 1926, avalanches were a constant threat to the Great Northern Railroad in Scenic, Washington. The railroad company decided to build an eight-mile tunnel that would make snow slides less of a hazard through this area, so recruits and... Read More