Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collections Stealing The Fire and California Tales. Her reviews, interviews, and cultural reporting have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Daily Beast, the Paris Review, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, Bookforum, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and BBC.com among others. She is a current vice president/online and former president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Dana Spiotta's ambitious new novel follows two women, friends and filmmakers, through decades of conversations about art, film and life — and a dangerous final documentary project.
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Paul Goldberg's audacious new novel trades in rumor and anecdote, conjuring a time of anti-Semitism and violence in 1950s Moscow.
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Bonnie Jo Campbell's confessional, unforgettable new story collection gives a voice to mothers and daughters, struggling to get by, desperate to be heard, but despairing of an audience.
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Samantha Shannon's richly detailed follow-up to The Bone Season picks up with clairvoyant heroine Paige on the run after leading a revolt against the alien oppressors of her far-future England.
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Family Furnishings collects 24 of short story master Alice Munro's best works. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari calls it a superb introduction to Munro, and a reminder that she's a writer to be cherished.
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The characters in Monica McFawn's short stories range from a gambling nanny to a butterfly-selling mathematician. Each story is full of carefully observed human detail and flashes of brilliance.
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Richard House's 1,048-page thriller is a series of interlocking novels within novels about a British contractor who flees Iraq after being framed for the loss of $53 million in development money.
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In Norman Lock's new novel, Huck and Jim set out on their raft in 1835, but are swept up and along through three wrenching centuries: slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and onward.
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Susan Minot's new novel is a departure from her usual minimalist explorations of upper-crust love. Based on her own journalism, it's a gripping fictionalized account of the 1996 abduction of 139 Ugandan schoolgirls by militant guerrillas. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says Thirty Girls is "panoramic" and "poetic" in its descriptions. -
Rachel Urquhart's debut novel, The Visionist, is based in real life: the Visionists were young Shaker girls who began to suffer mysterious fits one day in August 1837. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says The Visionist is a "surprisingly dark tale," but lyrically written, and offering a fresh look at Shaker life.
