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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Three new art books feature female subjects of every shape and hue from all over the world, doing the things that women have historically done — and also the things that men have historically done.
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Atypical of inspirational weight-loss books, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry — an advocate of Serial podcast subject Adnan Syed — is a love letter to the author's native cuisine.
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More than most books four times its size, Foster does several of the things we ask of great literature: It expands our world, diverting our attention outward, and it opens up our hearts and minds.
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Elizabeth McCracken promised her mom she'd never write about her. But this work of fiction strives to conjure her up in order to prevent her from "evanescing."
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Manguso made a name for herself in minutely observed memoirs. Now she uses fiction to write about what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious town.
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Phyllis Fischer, a 40-year-old wife and mother, is drawn into a liberating relationship with a much younger man. She soon realizes that perhaps she wasn't so content as she thought.
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Author Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, tackles the ups and downs of a long, not always happy marriage in her excellently named new story collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.
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Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows two women, college friends now on the cusp of 30, as they struggle to live and find meaning in a world that's become increasingly unlivable on many levels.
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James Rebanks' new book Pastoral Song urgently conveys how the drive for cheap, mass-produced food has impoverished both small farmers and the soil, threatening humanity's future.
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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.