Darkness remains Lisa Unger’s friend

In the BloodBy Lisa Unger(Touchstone) Each of Lisa Unger’s visits to The Hollows delves deeper into the myriad residents of this quiet town about 160 kilometers from New York City. Here, in this idyllic-sounding town, there is a menace that latches onto those who live here and seeps into their lives.Unger continues her dark psychological approach in this third visit to The Hollows. The only recurring characters in Unger’s The Hollows novels are Jones Cooper, a detective, and his psychologist wif

Jan. 23, 2014

Anxiety sufferer’s brutally frank tale

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of MindBy Scott Stossel(Alfred A. Knopf)“No sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night,” the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed. Many of you will know exactly what he means. (Trust me, I do: I’m a freelancer.) Some 40 million Americans suffer from the gnawing unease of

Jan. 23, 2014

Ko Un wins prestigious poetry award

Renowned poet Ko Un has been selected as the 2014 winner of the Golden Wreath, one of the most prestigious awards for poets given by Struga Poetry Evenings, an international poetry festival held annually in Struga, Republic of Macedonia.The festival was first founded in 1962, and the Golden Wreath international award was established in 1966. The first recipient was Soviet poet Robert Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky (1932-1994), who is considered one of the pioneers of poetry in the former Soviet Union.

Jan. 21, 2014

Young adult authors Riggs and Mafi an enchanting couple

Ransom Riggs and Tahereh Mafi spend their days in Santa Monica, sitting side by side at a shared desk in identical chairs in their backyard office, wearing headphones, working at their laptops. Across a cool green expanse sits their Spanish-style house, hidden behind a vine-covered wall.“I really loved books about secret worlds, like ‘The Secret Garden’ and the ‘Bridge to Terabithia,’” says Riggs, whose young adult novel “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” was a bestseller in 2011. “St

Jan. 16, 2014

Spanish-language books flourish thanks to e-readers

For decades, finding Spanish-language books in the U.S. was like tilting at windmills.Booksellers stocked few titles in the language of Cervantes, and those they carried came at a hefty premium. A paperback copy of “Don Quijote” in the original Spanish could easily cost triple the price of a deluxe hard-bound translation in English ― if it could be found at all.Retailers blamed the expense of importing books printed in Spain and Latin America. And U.S. publishers lost faith in the market after b

Jan. 16, 2014

Sharon biography exhaustive, exhausting

Arik: The Life of Ariel SharonBy David Landau (Knopf) Its dust jacket hails “Arik,” published this month, as “the first in-depth, comprehensive biography of Ariel Sharon, the most dramatic and imposing Israeli political and military leader of the last 40 years.”Comprehensive it certainly is, and author David Landau’s timing is fortuitous. Sharon died Saturday at age 85. Born Feb. 26, 1928, in Kfar Malal in central Israel to parents of Russian Jewish descent, Ariel Sharon (originally, Scheinerman

Jan. 16, 2014

New collection of author interviews

How to Read a NovelistBy John Freeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)The arts journalists can get a little weird around great novelists. We write for a living. So do they. But that shred of similarity can make us envy and idolize what they do. They’re like us, but bigger, better and more imaginative.I’ve always enjoyed reading John Freeman’s author profiles because he seems entirely comfortable with his corner of the firmament and place in the pecking order. His new collection, the cheekily titled “

Jan. 16, 2014

‘Fear Nothing’ is vivid, psychological

Fear NothingBy Lisa Gardner(Dutton)Nobody writes about the psychological aspects of working in law enforcement better than Lisa Gardner. She can take potentially disturbing scenarios that are frighteningly real and make them compelling, which she does in her latest novel, “Fear Nothing.”An alternative title could be “Pain Management” because the story takes a hard look at what constitutes physical pain ― and how a person deals with it.Police Detective D.D. Warren is checking out a crime scene fo

Jan. 9, 2014

From recounts rebuilding of Democrats

The New Democrats and the Return to PowerBy Al From(Palgrave Macmillan)Al From’s “The New Democrats and the Return to Power” tells the important story of how a political party in trouble can reinvent itself and regain power.The book is particularly timely because the Republican Party’s leadership has set a goal of broadening its appeal after losing the last two presidential elections. And the Democrats will need to look closely at their political direction after President Barack Obama, with his

Jan. 9, 2014

Lee Chang-rae publishes first fantasy novel

Renowned Korean-American writer Lee Chang-rae has ventured into the genre of fantasy fiction with his latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea.”The novel, published in the U.S. earlier this month, is set in a dystopian future where a socially stratified society ― consisting of elite Charter villages, middle-class labor colonies and the wild and impoverished “open counties” ― dominates its people. Fan, the novel’s 16-year-old protagonist, is a fish-tank diver in the community of B-Mor (once known as Bal

Jan. 9, 2014

Minumsa publishing house introduces grand Korean history book series

Minumsa, one of the leading publishing houses in the country, unveiled its ambitious project this week: A new 16-volume series featuring Korean history.The publishing house introduced the first two volumes of the series on Tuesday, one featuring 15th century Joseon and the other on the 16th century. The remaining 14 installments will hit local bookstores over the next three years. “For the last 50 years, we have been publishing a lot of books on philosophy and literature, not too many on history

Jan. 9, 2014

Books on early Korean history published by Harvard University

Two English books have been published by Harvard University as part of its project to look at early Korean history and archeology, often viewed and told from Japanese and Chinese perspectives. Titled “New Perspectives on Early Korean Art: From Silla to Koryo” and “The Han Commanderies in Early Korean History,” the books are the fifth and sixth volumes of the Early Korea Project Occasional Series by the Korea Institute at the prestigious U.S. school. The project and its publications are sponsored

Jan. 8, 2014

Centuries of Baghdad poetry

Baghdad: The City in VerseBy Reuven Snir(Harvard University Press)Baghdad is a city that looms large in the American imagination. In 2003, at the start of the last Iraq war, it was occupied by U.S. troops. In the years that followed, thousands of U.S. citizens (soldiers, contractors, officials and journalists) passed through Baghdad.My own memories of the city are of its heat and light and the brokenness of its buildings and the kindness of its people. I lived there in 2003, briefly, as a report

Jan. 2, 2014

Bridget Jones in the age of Twitter

Bridget Jones: Mad About the BoyBy Helen Fielding(Knopf)When a character like Bridget Jones is so beloved that she becomes something of a virtual best friend, it’s devastating to loyal, emotional readers when she just up and disappears for 13 years. (It was only two years between “Bridget Jones’ Diary” in 1998 and “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” in 2000.)After such a long wait, it’s a grand delight to find that author Helen Fielding’s third Bridget romp is every bit as engaging, hilarious an

Jan. 2, 2014

‘Faithful Scribe,’ a keen insight into Pakistan’s past, present and future

From the first pages of his debut book, “The Faithful Scribe,” journalist Shahan Mufti gets personal.He imagines a dinner party in which you, the reader, ask where he’s from, and after hearing him reply, “Pakistan,” you ask him why the country is such a mess.Mufti, who grew up in the United States and Pakistan, attempts to answer that question and many more by probing his own family history to better understand the roots of the world’s first Islamic democracy.He artfully weaves stories of his an

Jan. 2, 2014

‘Mother, Mother’: powerful trip through mom-daughter angst

Feeling overwhelmed by all the, you know, cheer in the air this time of year? Wishing for a little doom, a little gloom to balance things out? Have I got the book for you, and I mean that in a most complimentary way to the author.Koren Zailckas’ fiercely disturbing “Mother, Mother” is, under no circumstances, a book that you should read when you’re feeling depressed, or you’re kind of hating your mom, or you feel the need for some light chick-lit. It is, however, one of the most profound and ins

Jan. 2, 2014

Walter Mosley makes an e-book, ‘Odyssey’

Back in April, as we were wandering the L.A. neighborhood in which he was raised, Walter Mosley mentioned “Parishioner,” a novel that he had published as an e-book original. If you don’t know it, that’s not surprising; it was a small book, sneaked out (if such a thing is possible) in the months leading up to the release of the Easy Rawlins-resurrecting “Little Green.”When I asked why he’d chosen to do it as an e-book, he gave a little shrug. “Oh, you know,” he said. “I write so much, I write so

Dec. 26, 2013

Poetic sketches evoke solitude

DrawingsBy Sylvia Plath(Harper)The most striking thing about the 44 images reproduced in Sylvia Plath’s “Drawings” may be how unpopulated they are.Produced during the two years the poet spent on a Fulbright fellowship at Cambridge ― the same period in which she met and married (secretly, at first) Ted Hughes ― this material evokes a world bound almost entirely by objects: boats, shoes, rooftops, all of it detailed, shadowed, but at the same time more than a little bit removed.That’s not entirely

Dec. 26, 2013

‘Unbound’ explores Roth’s standing

Roth UnboundBy Claudia Roth Pierpont(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)If you’ve been tempted to dismiss Philip Roth as a misogynist, a self-hating Jew or simply an old white male dinosaur, Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books” makes a strong argument for giving the novelist another chance.At a minimum, Pierpont’s lucid book, intelligent but not academic, makes the case that “The Ghost Writer,” “Sabbath’s Theater” and “American Pastoral” are compelling works of fiction worth rea

Dec. 26, 2013