Heller McAlpin
Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
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Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife and Southern Lady Code, is back with her third book in five years — in which the connection with her longtime, close-knit female friends features prominently. -
Rachel Cusk follows her acclaimed Outline trilogy with this story about a woman whose lifelong obsession with a truculent painter is tested when he comes to stay at a cottage on her property. -
Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel — which she wrote in Italian, then translated back to English herself — centers on a middle-aged Italian woman trying to figure out her place in the world. -
Elizabeth McCracken's new story collection dazzles with verbal flexibility, insight and feeling, capturing the oddities and mixed bags, the loves and losses that make up most people's lives. -
Haruki Murakami's plain-spoken new story collection features narrators a lot like him — male, middle-aged, recounting inexplicably strange things that have happened to them, -
Patricia Lockwood's first novel follows an Extremely Online woman whose life changes forever when her niece is born with a serious illness — which sounds Hallmark-ready, but Lockwood pulls it off. -
A new book by Suleika Jaouad, author of the column "Life, Interrupted," encompasses a less familiar tale of what it's like to survive cancer and have to figure out how to live again in its aftermath. -
What's particularly salient in this book of previously uncollected essays is Didion's trademark farsightedness — especially striking decades later. But it does leave one wishing to hear from her now. -
Eley Williamsdid her doctoral dissertation on "mountweazels," fake words inserted into dictionaries as copyright traps — and she builds on that in her charming debut novel, about an epic dictionary. -
Fans of Jane Smiley's previous books will be pleased to see that talking horses make a return in her latest — plus a dog, a raven and a couple of ducks, all making lives for themselves in Paris.
