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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Amid disquisitions on the importance of thank-you notes and a hilariously graphic description of a mammogram, Ellis occasionally ventures into more weighty territory in her first work of nonfiction.
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Sally Rooney avoids a sophomore slump with Normal People, a will-they-won't-they love story with sympathetic protagonists whose lives are complicated by economic uncertainty and class differences.
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Susan Choi's new novel is set at a performing arts high school in the 1980s, as students navigate the line between adolescence and adulthood, student-teacher relationships and the drama of first love.
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Rajeev Balasubramanyam's fourth novel follows a cantankerous yet sympathetic economics professor whose life is upended after he fails yet again to win a Nobel Prize (among other, lesser catastrophes).
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"Comma Queen" Mary Norris is an uncommonly engaging, witty enthusiast with a nose for delicious details and funny asides that makes you willing to follow her anywhere.
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Nell Freudenberger's new novel is a bittersweet love story — about a lost friend, a missed romance, and an all-consuming career — that uses dense scientific concepts to illuminate everyday emotions.
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Andrew Ridker's sharp, compassionate first novel follows a family of flawed but sympathetic bumblers whose efforts to do good more often end up causing harm — to themselves and others.
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Valeria Luiselli's twist on the great American road trip novel follows a family with two children on a grim odyssey through the Southwest, a vision of a country blighted by industry and prejudice.
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Elizabeth McCracken's new novel — a multigenerational saga centered around a Massachusetts bowling alley and its crew of misfits — will grab you from the very first line.
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Very little actually is sacred — at least to begin with — in Amanda Sthers' lively new novel about a Jewish pig farmer in Israel, his fractious family, and their voluminous correspondence.