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“Kate Atkinson Returns, Looking For ‘Good News’” (NPR’s Books We Like, October 2008)

“An Imperfect But Epic ‘America’ ” (NPR’s Books We Like, September 2008)

“Russian Immigrants Feast On ‘Food And Love’ ” (NPR’s Books We Like, July 2008)

Jennifer Weiner’s 2001 debut smash, Good In Bed — which is the kind of book you buy for a plane ride, then are surprisingly pleased you did — introduced us to the agreeably mordant Cannie Shapiro, who, overweight, scorned, and inadvertently on the way to motherhood, writes her way out of a hole and into a career and marriage with a naughty best-seller. (Yes, it’s meta.)

“Fractious, Funny Lives of Mothers and ‘Girls’” (NPR’s Books We Like, June 2008)

“S.E. Hinton is a girl?” my friend’s husband, incredulous, asked me last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Given the fact that the author’s “The Outsiders,” her iconic work, is still read in classrooms across the country, and that her particulars—she published the work when she was 17 as, yes, a girl—are splashed on nearly every copy, it’s a perplexingly enduring question. Perhaps for readers of any age it’s still difficult to believe that this profoundly diligent explorer of male adolescence, the woman who brought philosophizing, switchblade-bearing toughs with way too much hair oil and free time onto every teenager’s bookshelf, probably did it in a bra…

“The brotherhood of S.E. Hinton” (The Chicago Tribune, May 2008)

Take a young man, successful but lacking in experience. Add a woman, opaque and mysterious, her past a dark negative the narrator holds up to the light, finding only his own reflection. Throw in a war, a disillusioned journalist as the antagonist whose world-weary asides counter the young man’s tedious ignorance…

“Fiction Chronicle” (The New York Times Book Review, April 2007)

EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain…

“Yummy Mummy” (New York Times, December 2006)

Bret Easton Ellis needs no introduction. Not because his first novel, Less Than Zero, was a “zeitgeist touchstone,” or because he has been profiled in “every magazine and newspaper that existed,” or because his name is as “recognizable as most movie stars’ or athletes’.” No, it is because, for those of you who may not be aware of these facts, the author notes all of the above and more in his handy 30-page preface to Lunar Park, which constitutes his sixth novel, or, if you will, a gathering of “controlled, cinematic haiku”…

“Cut-Rate Horror” (The Baltimore Sun, August 2005)

Few activities are as likely to bring on a fit of depressive jealousy as leafing through the back pages of one’s alumni magazine…

“Admit It: Your Life Stinks” (The New York Times Book Review, January 2005)

Getting The Spirit In The Dark

Pleading The Fifth

Coming To Rest

How Have I Not Written About This Book Yet?

Cold Comfort; Or, In Which I Don’t Even Try To Fight The Metaphor

Time Outs