Lonesome Reader

Most of us have, at some point, built an entire inner life around someone we barely know. Maybe it was a stranger glimpsed on the same commute every morning, or a person whose few words to us we replayed until they carried enormous weight. These fixations can feel embarrassi...

Lately I've found myself overcome by a real sense of anxiety about the future, partly, I think, because I've reached a point of relative contentment in my life that makes me newly aware of how precarious everything actually is: how I might lose the people and things I love most, my husband, my family, all of it, and how uncertain the ...

I sometimes really enjoy reading weird books, for want of a better phrase: novels that use an unconventional structure, mix genres, and find a kind of truth that so-called conventional storytelling can't reach. I often find them exhilarating and fun, if also frustrating, and...

The world has felt quite heavy lately, and I've come to treasure the kind of novel I can turn to for solace in such times. Not a slight or simplistic book, but a quiet one: contemplative and reflective, where nothing too dramatic or tragic occurs, yet which looks at identity, memory and relationships in a ge...

I need to begin with a caution I don’t usually give: Elif Shafak’s engrossing new novel spoils the ending of “Madame Bovary” in its opening pages. Many readers have asked whether they should read Flaubert’s classic first, and if you want its ending kept intact, the answer is yes. That said, I don’t think it’...