"The Chosen" is a very moving book and a good place to start reading Potok.

Davis writes sharp, pungent, chiseled, sometimes funny, sometimes wrenchingly painful stories. She is a highly regarded translator of French to English ("Swann's Way," among many others) and her absolute control of language is equally evident in her translations and her fiction. "Break It Down" is where I started and it immediately made me a fierce Lydia Davis partisan. She is like no other writer.

Min Jin Lee's writing combines a worldly, dry-eyed, often hilarious contemporary sensibility with the close observation, domestic focus, and richness of old-fashioned story-telling technique. A long short story drawn from "Free Food for Millionaires" is online at www.NarrativeMagazine.com.

I started with The Country Life and was delightfully engaged by the crisp, clear, energetic writing, the intriguing story and sympathetic characterizations. I've been looking for another hit of the same from Cusk ever since; unfortunately, although I have tried three other of her books (The Lucky Ones, In the Fold and her nonfiction account of maternity, A Life's Work) I have not been similarly drawn in. In The Fold seems almost defiantly oblique about revealing its characters, and I found A Life's Work downright offensive. (That may be more of an ideological objection than a literary one, however.) The Lucky Ones is so schematically laid out that its characters are all but crushed under the weight of the author's plans for them. I haven't given up though--I really liked The Country Life a lot.

Sacks is a brilliant British-born neurologist who observes his patients with profound, sympathetic attention and relates their case histories in an irresistible novelistic voice. With its restless intelligence, omnivorous curiosity, dry humor and sometimes eccentric worldview, his voice reminds me strangely of Conan Doyle's in the Sherlock Holmes stories. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a collection of case histories, is probably the place to start. "Awakenings" might be another good starting point. It is the extraordinary story of his work with patients who had been left in suspended animation by a pandemic of sleeping-sickness in the late teens and early 1920's. Forty years later, Sacks used L-Dopa to briefly reawaken them. The results are fascinating and heartbreaking.

I too would recommend starting with Native Speaker. Aloft is also absorbing and memorable, and probably a more writerly, sophisticated book, but Native Speaker has a winning quality that makes you want to read more of Lee.

Ann Fessler is an artist, not a writer. "The Girls Who Went Away," which grew out of her artwork, may well be her only book, so obviously it is the place to start. But it is such a good book, I wanted to add it to the database here. It is about girls who became pregnant during high school and ended up surrendering their babies for adoption. Click on the title for more info.

I just read my first Angela Carter--"The Magic Toyshop." It was very much as LilyB describes her work (above) and completely enthralling. I will certainly read more, so this must be a good place to start.

I think Steve Martin is truly brilliant. Shopgirl is an excellent novel, with no cheap laughs (and not too many other kinds of laughs--if anything, the book is restrained to a fault). It's very considerably better than the movie. I would start with Shopgirl. The Pleasure of My Company DOES have some cheap laughs, and some much more rewarding laughs, and it, too, is a good book and well worth reading. Both are genuine acts of imagination.

"Legends of the Fall" is one of three novellas included in this volume; the others are "Revenge" and "The Man Who Gave Up His Name."

From a review by James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review:


The Expendability Doctrine is an oil conspiracy thriller, about utterly ruthless criminal behavior motivated by sheer lust for money and power.
When a British industrialist is professionally murdered amid an international oil crisis, his wife absconds, and a malicious pattern begins to unfold. A suspenseful saga stretching from Britain's east coast to the nightmare slayings in Libyan gaols, The Expendability Doctrine revolves around a creed that lives up to the ruthlessness of its title. Highly recommended.

(http://www.midwestbookreview.com)

The Expendability Doctrine
Patrick Mackeown
Bookscope
PO Box 53225, London N3 2XW
0955432804 $12.99 www.bookscape.co.uk

Publisher's description of The Hungry Tide from HarperCollins website:

The Hungry Tide
by Amitav Ghosh

An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.

It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh’s new novel. In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator.

And it is into this terrain that an eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans. In January 2001, a small ship arrives to conduct an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment, and the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society.

Reviews

'An exceptional writer.' - Peter Matthieson

‘A novelist of dazzling ingenuity' - San Francisco Chronicle

'A distinctive voice, polished and profound' - Times Literary Supplement

'An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity.' J- M Coetzee

'Ghosh is one of the most sympathetic post-colonial voices to be heard today. He looks at love and loyalty, and examines the question of Empire and responsibility, of tradition and modernity.’ - Ahdaf Souief

'Ghosh has established himself as one of the finest prose writers of his generation of Indians writing in English' - Financial Times

'Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer…a deeply serious writer, sure of his human and historical insights and confident in his ability to communicate them. I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast' - The Times

Ann Fessler is an artist. This book grew out of a series of works she did about adoption (she was adopted herself). "The Girls Who Went Away" is about girls who became pregnant during high school or college in the years between WWII and Roe v. Wade, and who ended up surrendering their babies for adoption. It is an amazing book. Fessler interviewed dozens of women who "gave their babies away" and examines the social norms that conspired to force them to this wrenching decision (or "decision," since in so many cases, the girls felt they had no choice). I am an adoptive mother. I have thought many times about what my child's birthmother must have felt, but nothing I could imagine had the force, the wrenching power of these honestly, simply told stories. This is material I have never seen in print before, yet what it discusses deeply touched tens of thousands of lives. It's very moving and I hope will reach many people.