Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collections Stealing The Fire and California Tales. Her reviews, interviews, and cultural reporting have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Daily Beast, the Paris Review, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, Bookforum, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and BBC.com among others. She is a current vice president/online and former president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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In Norman Lock's new novel, Huck and Jim set out on their raft in 1835, but are swept up and along through three wrenching centuries: slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and onward.
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Susan Minot's new novel is a departure from her usual minimalist explorations of upper-crust love. Based on her own journalism, it's a gripping fictionalized account of the 1996 abduction of 139 Ugandan schoolgirls by militant guerrillas. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says Thirty Girls is "panoramic" and "poetic" in its descriptions. -
Rachel Urquhart's debut novel, The Visionist, is based in real life: the Visionists were young Shaker girls who began to suffer mysterious fits one day in August 1837. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says The Visionist is a "surprisingly dark tale," but lyrically written, and offering a fresh look at Shaker life.
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Olivia Laing illuminates the complex relationships between writers and alcohol in The Trip to Echo Spring — Echo Spring being, of course, the euphemism Tennessee Williams used for the liquor cabinet in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says the book is "beautifully written, haunting, tragic and instructive in the best sense."
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Amy Tan's fans will find familiar themes in her new novel, The Valley of Amazement: mothers and daughters, multi-generational secrets, Chinese-American identity. But Jane Ciabattari says the new work, which centers on an American madam in Shanghai and her courtesan daughter, is more sophisticated than Tan's previous novels.
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Stephane Michaka's novel Scissors fictionalizes the last 10 years in the life of short story master Raymond Carver and Carver's difficult relationship with his legendary editor Gordon Lish. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says Scissors is an "empathetic exploration of an author's soul." -
The Bone Season kicks off a new fantasy series about a clairvoyant girl in a future dystopia. Author Samantha Shannon was a student when she started writing — now, she's being touted as the next J. K. Rowling. And reviewer Jane Ciabattari says her work lives up to the hype.
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Claire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs, delves into the inner life of the quiet, friendly — and secretly furious — woman upstairs, a frustrated artist named Nora who becomes obsessed with a glamorous immigrant family.
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Fiona Maazel's new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is a deliriously inventive tale of love and spycraft. Utopian cult leader Thurlow pines for his ex-wife Esme. She uses her CIA connections to keep him safe under her surveillance in a story layered with espionage, sex and jokes about Kim Jong Il.
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In her new story collection, This Close, Jessica Francis Kane depicts a group of women who are worn down, overwhelmed by love and loss, yet familiar as old friends. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says they are "our family, our friends and neighbors. They are us, at our most vulnerable."
