The massive novel about World War II is often the butt of literary jokes, but what it says about humanity’s lethal virus-spreading has everything to do with how we live now.
Tom LeClair's reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation. He is the author of In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, and seven novels--Well-Founded Fear, Passing On, Passing Off, Passing Through, Passing Away, Lincoln's Billy, and The Liquidators. His essays are included in What to Read (and Not) and Harpooning Donald Trump.
Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, and Jonathan Lethem have all published fiction that deals with the Age of Trump, but where are the pens warmed up in hell?
A vicious, albeit artful satire about the execution of the Rosenbergs, Robert Coover’s searing novel predicts our ugly mash-up of politics and entertainment.
The crowds of protesters at Trump Tower have thinned in the weeks since the election, but one man’s rage propels him to stay at his lonely post on Fifth Avenue.
Once a literary prize more prestigious than the Pulitzer, the National Book Award has lost its way by trying to please too many people. The result is mediocrity.
Publishers are at it again: paying way more than they should for first novels that look impressive and entertain but lack the heft of true greatness.
What’s a novelist to do after winning literature’s greatest laurel? In his new ‘A Strangeness in My Mind’ and other works, it seems the Turkish prodigy is edging into early retirement.
The novelist’s new mega-tome is a strangely needy book, chock full of autobiography, from a domineering mother to a friendship-rivalry mirroring his own relationship with David Foster Wallace.
America’s only living Nobel prize winning author revisits some familiar themes in her latest novel, but too often she fails to meet her own exacting standards.
Novelists Tom LeClair and Jerome Charyn talk about their respective experiences of dealing with the ever mysterious Honest Abe in their fiction.