A teacher becomes obsessed with a charismatic family in Claire Messud’s fierce portrait of thwarted creativity. As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage
Schlagwort-Archive: Laura Miller
Artikel: With crowdsourcing, everyone’s a detective now
Reddit got it all wrong. So why do we all think we have the expertise to solve crimes after watching “CSI”?
Rezension: Kate Atkinson: “Life After Life”
Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life,”is not quite a time-travel narrative, but it does dangle before its reader’s nose that most tantalizing of impossible offers, “a chance to do it again and again,” as one character puts it, “until we finally did get it right.”
Artikel: Desecrating Poe
The horror of “The Following” comes not just from the storytelling, but from the way it maligns a literary legacy.
Rezension (Hörbuch): Lydia Cooper: “My Second Death”
The narrator of Lydia Cooper’s “My Second Death” has antisocial personality disorder. But how crazy is she, really?
Rezension: Caldwell Crosby: “The Great Pearl Heist”
A cat-and-mouse game in the streets of Edwardian London and the world’s most valuable necklace — how is it that no one has turned the true story told in Molly Caldwell Crosby’s “The Great Pearl Heist” into a movie?
Rezension: Karen Engelmann: “The Stockholm Octavo”
Powdered wigs, poisoned fans and a lively deck of cards: Karen Engelmann’s “The Stockholm Octavo” is a bonbon box filled with treats designed to appeal to lovers of literary historical thrillers.
Rezension: Damien Echols: “Life After Death”
Everyone knows that Damien Echols has a remarkable, chilling story to tell. He spent 18 years (half his life) on death row for a crime he did not commit. With two teenage friends, Echols was convicted in 1994 for the murders of three little boys.
Artikel: “The Wire” is NOT like Dickens
“‘The Wire’ is like a Victorian novel” – this facile, cocktail-party insight has been cropping up a lot lately, although it’s hard to see why someone who loves the HBO series about life and crime in contemporary Baltimore and the fiction of 19th-cent. England would insist upon it.
Rezension: Errol Morris: “A Wilderness of Error”
Some believe with all their hearts that MacDonald is guilty. Others believe with equal vehemence that he’s not. By the end of his new book Morris is careful to state that he does not know whether MacDonald is the killer.
Rezension: Laura Lippman: “And When She Was Good”
Lippman’s latest is “And When She Was Good,” a title that saucily suggests the novel will be racier than it is. “And When She Was Good” is in essence a character study, though the basic thread of its plot does generate a good amount of suspense.
Rezension: Gillian Flynn: “Gone Girl”
A demanding wife vanishes into thin air in Gillian Flynn’s brilliant, blackly comic crime novel, “Gone Girl” – What does a good crime novel do? At the very least, it must lure its reader into the classic rhythm of transgression and retribution, mystery and solution.
Rezension: Richard Lloyd Parry: “People Who Eat Darkness”
An incisive and compelling account of the case of Lucie Blackman. Lucie – tall, blonde, and 21 years old – stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000, and disappeared forever. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found.
Rezension: Hilary Mantel: “Bring Up the Bodies”
“Bring Up the Bodies” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters.
Rezension: William Boyd: “Waiting for Sunrise”
It’s Vienna, 1914, and everyone is preoccupied with the secret side of life. Lysander Rief, a young British actor visiting the city, learns that the parlormaid in his respectable boarding house has been turning tricks with a fellow guest.
Rezension: Raymond Bonner: »Anatomy of Injustice«
Make no mistake, Raymond Bonner’s new book, »Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong«, is a movie idea begging to be greenlighted. It would make an ideal vehicle for Sandra Bullock (or maybe Julia Roberts).