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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Colm Tóibín's new novel is set in his Irish home town in the early 1970s, and follows the titular Nora as she and her family struggle to cope with the loss of her beloved husband.
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There are no winners in Joseph O'Neill's new novel The Dog, just a long downward spiral into stalemate as the nameless narrator flees a bad breakup and gets mired in shady financial dealings in Dubai.
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Marcos Giralt Torrente's memoir of his absentee father, the famed Spanish painter Juan Giralt, frequently resorts to lists and repetition to get across Torrente's exasperation, anger and love.
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Eimear McBride's debut uses fractured poetry to tell the story of a young girl trying to drown mental anguish with physical pain. Critic Heller McAlpin calls it devastating and ferociously original.
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Daphne Merkin's new essay collection straddles the high/low cultural divide with aplomb. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says Lunches is unfailingly intelligent, but should be enjoyed in small bites.
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Critic Heller McAlpin says readers picking up Paulo Coelho's new Adultery in search of deep philosophical insight on marital infidelity and a lack of cliches might be better off with Madame Bovary.
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The chilling murder mystery The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair may be a bestseller abroad, but critic Heller McAlpin tells those looking for literary depth not to get their hopes up.
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Legendary food writer Ruth Reichl stumbles on her first foray into fiction, with a novel about food, love and redemption that critic Heller McAlpin calls "as predictably sweet as packaged cakes."
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The nine tales in Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck deal with death, tragedy and darkness, but the collection shines due to the mesmerizing strangeness of its extraordinary images.
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Two decades after Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen is back with Cambridge, an unflinching, elegiac, quasi-autobiographical novel that takes us back to her childhood in the 1950s.