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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Dava Sobel's new book is a history of the unheralded women — called computers, rather than astronomers — who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, studying, cataloging and classifying stars.
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Moonglow is a playful, fictional take on the family memoir. Set in 1990, it stars young author "Mike" Chabon, who's visiting his dying grandfather. Grandpa, it turns out, has led a remarkable life.
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April Ayers Lawson's debut story collection features young, often sheltered characters struggling with intimacy in a world where ordinary uncertainties are amplified by a fundamentalist upbringing.
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Francine Prose takes a comparatively light comic turn in her new novel, about the disappointing lives of a group of people involved in an off-off-off-off-Broadway musical based on a children's book.
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John Kaag's new memoir-slash-philosophical treatise begins at a low point in his life, and follows his quest for answers to a dusty old library that proves to be a treasure trove of American thought.
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Jonathan Safran Foer returns with a door-stopper of a meditation on family, identity and Judaism. It's the story of a crumbling marriage set against the backdrop of a crisis in Israel.
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Maggie O'Farrell's novel jumps among multiple storylines, points of view, times and places to tell the story of an American professor who meets a reclusive French actress on a lonely Irish road.
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Jonas Karlsson's clever parable follows an average guy who Is uncommonly content with his lot in life — until he gets an astronomical bill from a sinister entity trying to redistribute happiness.
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Anne Tyler's latest is part of a series of Shakespeare plays turned novels; she's turned The Taming of the Shrew into a modern screwball comedy about an absent-minded scientist and his daughters.
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Alain de Botton returns to a long-standing fascination — the arc of relationships — in his new novel. But despite its fictional trappings, the book seems more like a class on maintaining a marriage.