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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In her new novel, Jami Attenberg dives deep into the dark heart of one family over the course of one long day, as their abusive, angry patriarch lies dying in the hospital after a heart attack.
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Known for the punch of her columns, The New York Times' Gail Collins sprinkles conversational, sardonic asides throughout No Stopping Us Now in an effort to keep the decades-long hike spry.
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Ten years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, where ornery Olive is learning about compassion, connection, and her own self.
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Deborah Levy's new book considers themes of objectification, betrayal and focus, centered on a historian who goes to East Berlin and finds himself both the observer and the observed.
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Smith's first short story collection is wide-ranging, covering everything from politics to murder to drag queens. Some of the slighter stories feel like footnotes, but many show off Smith at her best.
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With her new essay collection, Jamison reverses the arc of The Empathy Exams by moving from the external to the internal, from others' longings and hauntings to her own.
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Patchett's new novel is a story of paradise lost, dusted with fairy tale. It follows two siblings who bond after their mother leaves the family home — an ornate mansion she always hated.
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In her first essay collection, Rachel Cusk writes like someone who has been burned and has reacted not with self-censorship but with a doubling-down on clarity.
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Jacqueline Woodson's exquisitely wrought new novel follows two black families of different classes whose lives become intertwined when their only children conceive a child together in their teens.
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Cathleen Schine's new novel follows redheaded twin sisters whose obsessive love of language brings them close as children — and begins to drive them apart as increasingly competitive adults.