| “The long wait for a novel from short-story genius George Saunders is finally over. And as anyone who knows Saunders’s work would expect, his first novel is a strikingly original production, a divisively odd book bound either to dazzle or alienate readers. Distinct from the poignant satires he has published in the New Yorker and elsewhere, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is an extended national ghost story, an erratically funny and piteous seance of grief. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president; the Bardo is probably far less familiar. That Tibetan concept refers to an intermediate plane between our world and the next, a kind of Buddhist limbo experienced just after death.” | | | | | | | | March’s Reader Choice Selection: “Lincoln in the Bardo” | | “The long wait for a novel from short-story genius George Saunders is finally over. And as anyone who knows Saunders’s work would expect, his first novel is a strikingly original production, a divisively odd book bound either to dazzle or alienate readers. Distinct from the poignant satires he has published in the New Yorker and elsewhere, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is an extended national ghost story, an erratically funny and piteous seance of grief. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president; the Bardo is probably far less familiar. That Tibetan concept refers to an intermediate plane between our world and the next, a kind of Buddhist limbo experienced just after death.” | |  |
| Ron Charles • Washington Post Book World Editor • Read the full review »
WATCH: Ron Charles interviews George Saunders |
|
|
 | | | SPIES, SPIES EVERYWHERE: A JOURNEY THROUGH D.C. ESPIONAGE | | Mystery and intrigue are running wild in the capital these days. Secret conversations with dangerous diplomats, explosive foreign dossiers on American leaders, handwringing over national security and leaky intelligence. If you dip into the new book “Spy Sites of Washington, D.C.,” you will find that sneaking, lying and skullduggery are as old as the republic itself. And the D.C. region is full of the traces: hotels and parks and saloons and embassies and government offices where the deceitful and disloyal got up to their antics. Here is a sampling of sites where our nation’s espionage history has played out. | | View the graphic » |
|
|
 | | | AN INTERVIEW WITH MARGARET ATWOOD | | In one specific way, Donald Trump has been good for Margaret Atwood. Since he became president, the political shift has sent “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her dystopian novel about an authoritarian American society, rocketing back up the bestseller charts. But the Booker Prize-winning author says she’d rather talk about something that fills her with joy and the buoyancy of childhood optimism. Atwood, you see, was raised as a voracious reader of comics, a form she still adores. And so with her graphic-novel series “Angel Catbird” she continues to fulfill a dream at age 77, more than three decades after her “Handmaid’s Tale” painted a world of women subjugated within a Constitution-suspending dictatorship. She is experiencing, she says, one of her “unlived lives.” | | Read more » |
|
|
|
| “The World to Come” by Jim Shepard | | With his fifth short-story collection, “The World to Come,” Jim Shepard continues his original, precise exploration of times and places long ago and far, far away. Only two of the 10 stories here concern modern folks with recognizable American dissatisfactions. Shepard’s characters are too threatened for malaise — in fact, most of them are just trying to outrun death. | | Read the review » |
|
| “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid | | The Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, “Exit West,” takes the current Middle Eastern migrant crisis and injects a wizardry, an allegorical urgency, that declares this book’s intention to be art. In an unnamed city about to be wrecked by war — you will think Mosul or Aleppo — two students, Nadia and Saeed, begin a romance. With its decisive rhythm, its faint suggestion of mythos, the first line sets the pitch of this novel: “In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.” | | Read the review » |
|
| “Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman | | Neil Gaiman’s “Norse Mythology” employs a style that can be, at least initially, somewhat off-putting to an adult reader. Gaiman’s sentences appear so simple and plain that one wonders if the book is actually intended for 9-year-olds. At the same time, the author’s penchant for short paragraphs, some of only a single sentence, adds an air of portentousness. This combination of the faux-naif and the melodramatic is then further complicated by the diction of the gods. They speak a bit like comic-book superheroes: Thor is reminiscent of a slow-witted Hulk, while Loki — the charming trickster, the wry and handsome egotist — recalls the smart-alecky Ironman as played in films by Robert Downey Jr. | | Read the review » |
|
|
| “What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear” by Danielle Ofri | | If you’ve switched physicians in search of someone more caring or left an exam feeling unseen and unheard, you will find much to appreciate in Danielle Ofri’s perceptive book “What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear.” The shortcomings of the patient-doctor relationship are on full display as Ofri probes what goes wrong in the exam room and tallies the impact on the care we get. Ofri makes a compelling case that patient-doctor communication in the exam room is as crucial to diagnosis and treatment as expensive tests and procedures. Offering empathy, asking open-ended questions, involving the patient in a treatment plan and checking again and again to make sure patients understand are all key to making the sick better, she writes. | | Read the review » |
|
| “Age of Anger” by Pankaj Mishra | | Pankaj Mishra’s “Age of Anger” is a book about many things, a sort of intellectual history of history itself. But if there is one convincing conclusion that emanates from these pages, it is that these alternative explanations are not competing; in fact, they are barely alternatives. The two are bound together, reinforcing each other in cycles that long pre-date the Trump phenomenon. | | Read the review » |
|
|
| | | | | | | | |
|
|
|
| ©2017 The Washington Post, 1301 K St NW, Washington DC 20071 |
|
| | | | | |
|
Twitter
Facebook