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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J.C. Hallman's audacious account of his engagement with the erotic writing of Nicholson Baker makes a splash, but critic Heller McAlpin says the book sometimes runs aground in self-indulgence.
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Writer Sarah Manguso has been a compulsive diarist since childhood; her new memoir documents the ways motherhood has changed her writing. Critic Heller McAlpin says it's full of lovely observations.
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Anne Tyler's 20th novel will feel comfortably familiar to her fans — A Spool of Blue Thread is the long-haul story of an ordinary Baltimore family thrown into disarray by illness and sudden tragedy.
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Yes, you read that right. Nick Hornby's charming, light yet thoughtful tale of the creative team behind a fictional BBC sitcom in the 1960s takes the pejorative sting out of the word "heartwarming."
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Esther Freud's new novel Mr. Mac and Me traces an unlikely friendship between a lonely boy and a struggling artist. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says the book has both technical prowess and grace.
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Reviewer Heller McAlpin says Rachel Cusk, known for her lacerating memoirs, begins to bring her fiction and nonfiction closer together in Outline, an "impressive deepening" of her work.
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Ali Smith's new How To Be Both combines inventive structural trickery and warm, sardonic writing in in parallel tales of a bereaved modern teenager and an Italian renaissance fresco painter.
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When Christopher McCandless died in the wilds of Alaska, his story became famous all over the world. A new memoir by his sister Carine reveals some of the reasons he chose to walk away from the world.
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The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns, this time with a paean to the importance of literature in a democratic society. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says Azar Nafisi may be preaching to the choir.
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Michelle Raffin's new The Birds of Pandemonium is an impassioned but occasionally jumbled memoir of her adventures in the noisy, smelly, exhausting, rewarding world of rare bird conservation.