Mr. Amis published 15 novels, a well-regarded memoir (“Experience,” in 2000), works of nonfiction, and collections of essays and short stories. In his later work he investigated Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror and the legacy of the Holocaust.
He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) — which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work.
瑞典文學院在斯德哥爾摩公布了這一結果，稱門羅女士為「當代短篇小說大師」。
門羅現居安大略省的克林頓鎮，今年早些時候，她在接受《多倫多環球郵報》(The Toronto Globe and Mail)採訪時說自己正計劃在《親愛的生活》(Dear Life)出版之後退休，那是她的第14本短篇小說集。
她說自己迷戀於創作短篇小說，正是這種形式令她多少有些意外地一舉成名。
「多年來我想等有時間再寫長篇，這些短篇只是練習，」2012年，她在接受《紐約客》(The New Yorker)採訪時說。「後來我發現自己只能寫這樣的短篇小說，所以就接受了這個事實。我覺得自己努力把那麼多的東西都放進短篇小說里的做法是一種補償。」
瑞典文學院常務秘書長彼得·英格倫(Peter Englund)在宣布該獎之後接受採訪，說門羅女士能夠「描繪精彩的人類肖像」。他還說，門羅女士是否停止寫作完全由她自己決定。
「她創作了非凡的作品，」英格倫說，「迄今她所創作的作品已經足以為她贏得諾貝爾獎，如果她希望停止寫作，那完全是她自己的決定。」
Alice Munro Puts Down Her Pen to Let the World In
By CHARLES McGRATH
The renowned short-story writer says her writing days are over. She
plans to see more people, she said, "to get out on the surface of life."
Slide Show: Alice Munro Retires2013年諾貝爾文學獎（Nobel Prize in Literature）在台灣時間10日晚間七時宣佈，得獎人為加拿大女作家孟若（Alice Munro）。評審團認為孟若是「當代短篇小說的大師」，孟若也是繼2009年德國小說家米勒（Hertha Muller）後，再次獲得諾貝爾文學獎的女作家。
'The View From Castle Rock: Stories,' by Alice Munro
Review by A. O. SCOTT
Alice Munro's stories often explore the human and natural history of Ontario. A new collection ranges even farther.
RUNAWAY ALICE MUNRO A young woman on a train is approached by a nervous stranger. She blows him off. Not long after, his body is found on the tracks. Life is made up of such miniature tragedies, and so are Munro's powerful and perfect short stories, which focus on restless women who know more about what they're running from than where they're going.
Alice Munro's Vancouver
Footsteps
Dan Lamont for The New York Times
Kitsilano Beach, in the Vancouver neighborhood where Alice Munro
lived in the early 1950's, provided the setting for some of her fiction,
including "Cortes Island."
By DAVID LASKIN
Published: June 11, 2006
IN Alice Munro's Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the
seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs
at the Granville Island market. Ms. Munro, the 74-year-old Canadian
whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed "the best fiction writer now
working in North America," set a handful of her marvelous short stories
in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so
exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the
addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly
uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, blind to its own
staggering beauty, Ms. Munro's Vancouver is an outpost where new wives
blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to
begin.
Which is pretty much what Ms. Munro herself was doing when she came
here as a bride of 20. A small-town beauty from a poor southern Ontario
family, Ms. Munro moved reluctantly to Vancouver in 1952 after her
husband, Jim, landed a job in a big downtown department store. She
brought with her two years of university education and a few published
stories, a perfect 1950's cinched-waist figure, and a fierce sense of
irony that she kept carefully hidden.
Alice and Jim moved into the dark downstairs of a three-story rental on Arbutus Street right across from the beach in the Kitsilano neighborhood — and the building, No. 1316, is still there, in need of a paint job, on a street of "high wooden houses crammed with people living tight." Cross the street, stroll out on the packed sand, and the brooding immensity of Burrard Inlet and the coastal mountains engulfs you; a 10-minute drive across the Burrard Bridge and you're cruising through downtown's smorgasbord of world cuisine and high-end retail. Yet Kitsilano seems blithely unaware of its world-class setting.
"Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known," Ms. Munro writes in "Cortes Island," a story in her 1978 collection "The Love of a Good Woman" that matches detail for detail with her first months in Kits. "No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind." After a day of wandering the city vaguely looking for work, the story's nameless narrator (dubbed Little Bride by one of the other characters) returns to Kits Beach at dusk as "the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun's setting — and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight."
The clouds were scarcer, the light stronger on the January afternoon I prowled around Kits — but otherwise Ms. Munro has nailed the scene. I can perfectly imagine the struggling young writer stretched on her bed in the tiny dark bedroom bolting down Colette and Henry Green or bending over a notebook at the kitchen table, as the Little Bride in "Cortes Island" does, "filling page after page with failure."
No sign of anguished artistes the day of my visit. Fit young women jog through the park. A spread of fruit and pastry awaits a hungry movie crew outside the trendy Watermark Restaurant (Vancouver has become a big movie-making town in recent years). I stroll a few blocks up from the beach to Fourth Avenue — 30 years ago the main drag of Vancouver's counterculture (the scoundrel hippie brother in Ms. Munro's story "Forgiveness in Families" lived around here in a house full of smiling Hare Krishna-type priests), but now as bright and tony as New York's Columbus Avenue or San Francisco's Fillmore Street. The one holdover from Ms. Munro's time is Duthie Books at 2239 West Fourth Street — a literary bookstore that once had branches all over the city but has recently retreated to this one last thoroughly gentrified location.
The Munros' Kitsilano chapter was brief. By 1953 the couple had decamped to the North Shore suburbs just across the Lions Gate Bridge — first to a rather drab tract house in rainy North Vancouver, and then to a nicer place with a big front garden perched on a slope in the Dundarave section of West Vancouver. Two daughters arrived in quick succession (a third died the day she was born). The family lived in Dundarave for the next seven years, Jim commuting to his job downtown, Alice attempting to keep her art alive while managing the household.
The West Vancouver setting crops up again and again in Ms. Munro's stories — but it's always colored by the strain she was under in those years. "When I got home from school my mother would be sitting in that chair in the living room in the dark," Ms. Munro's daughter Sheila recalls. "She had great promise — she had published some stories — but she didn't know if she would continue to do it. She just wanted to be left alone to write."
The Dundarave house is still there — it's at 2749 Lawson Avenue — and so is the shopping block on Marine Drive where Ms. Munro used to walk (she never learned to drive) to do her marketing or to work in the office she rented for a while or to take Sheila to ballet class. Sheila remembers the block of shops as wonderfully ordinary — a hardware store, grocery store, cleaners and a Chinese restaurant.
But some of Vancouver's new-found cool has wafted across the water and today downtown Dundarave has a bit of the air of Sausalito — galleries and coffee places, chowder and sushi, a scattering of petals on the sidewalk outside the florist. In summer it would be the perfect place to grab a cappuccino, assemble a picnic and then head for the beach, two blocks away at Dundarave Pier or a hop east at Ambleside.
"Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs," opens "Jakarta," one of Ms. Munro's most memorable Vancouver stories from "The Love of a Good Woman" collection. It's unmistakably Ambleside Beach — though faux Mediterranean palazzi have muscled out most of the cottages that line the shore in Ms. Munro's story. From their outpost behind the logs, Kath and Sonje clutch their D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield and eye the gaggle of blowsy, noisy housewives they dub the Monicas:
"These women aren't so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they've reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she's a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal functions."
This is pure Munro: the social anxiety, the fusing of insecurity and disdain, the heavy tug of ordinary life, the way dread can rise and spread until it erases everything lovely. "She's always dead on," Sheila Munro says when I ask if the descriptions of places ring true to her childhood memories. And yet it strikes me when I walk out on Ambleside pier that Ms. Munro has neglected to mention this stupendous setting — the echoing curves of bridge and cove and mountain, the dull silver of the sea, the green-black hump of Stanley Park, all this grandeur of land and water so close it's as if the great northern wilderness laps at the city's feet.
But Ms. Munro was always oppressed, almost crushed by Vancouver's fabled vistas. In the story "Memorial," also set in West Vancouver, a character named Eileen challenges a wealthy foolish man who boasts about his water and mountain view.
"Well suppose you're in a low mood, and you get up and here spread out before you is this magnificent view. All the time, you can't get away from it. Don't you ever feel not up to it?"
"Not up to it?"
"Guilty," said Eileen, persistently though regretfully. "That you're not in a better mood? That you're not more — worthy, of this beautiful view?"
In 1963, the Munros left Dundarave and moved to Victoria to open a bookstore. The marriage broke up nine years later, and Alice returned to Ontario and eventually remarried, but the bookstore is still there — Munro's Books, still run by Jim, still one of the finest in Canada.
Alice never again lived in Vancouver though she does visit to collect prizes and still occasionally sets a story there. "What Is Remembered," from the 2001 collection "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," is one of her best and touches on all of her totemic Vancouver spots. Meriel, the young wife at the center of the story, is at a funeral in Dundarave when a man unknown to her, a doctor and bush pilot from the far north, offers to drive her on a visit to a distant suburb. All afternoon, sexual tension mounts until the pilot pulls over at the Prospect Point viewing area in Stanley Park, and the two strangers get out of the car and start wildly kissing.
Ms. Munro brings them to the glass-bricked entrance of a "small, decent building" in Kitsilano, but while they consummate their mad upsurge of passion in a borrowed flat, she cuts away to describe the setting Meriel would have preferred for adultery: "A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins."
It's just the kind of place Ms. Munro herself prefers — places like the Buchan Hotel, tucked away on a leafy side street near Stanley Park, or the ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel overlooking English Bay. By a stroke of literary magic, Ms. Munro makes an afternoon of adultery in Kitsilano all the more electric by having it happen off stage and in the wrong place, the wrong part of town, the wrong kind of bedroom.
In a way, it's a perfect metaphor for Ms. Munro's own relationship to Vancouver. For her, this was always the wrong place — the views too grand, the weather too gray, the trees too tall. She never cared for the stodgy repressed Vancouver of the 1950's and by all accounts she hasn't warmed much more to the sleek city of today. And yet, after you read her Vancouver stories, you sense her watchful, uprooted presence everywhere. It's a sign of Ms. Munro's greatness as a writer that she so pervades a place that she never really surrendered herself to.
IF YOU GO
WHERE TO EAT
Watermark (1305 Arbutus Street, 604-738-5487) is on the beach in Kitsilano, across the street from the Munros' first Vancouver home. The food, like roasted duck breast and lobster ravioli, is far trendier than anything in Ms. Munro's stories. Dinner for two without wine will run about 80 Canadian dollars (about $74 at 1.08 Canadian dollars to $1).
Bishop's Restaurant (2183 West Fourth Avenue, 604-738-2025) is the place for a classy splurge in Kitsilano. Vancouver's well-heeled artsy sophisticates dine here on organic regional produce and seafood — crab cakes, Pacific squid, steamed smoked sablefish — as well as Fraser Valley lamb with fingerling potatoes. Lots of flowers and local art. Dinner for two will run about 120 Canadian dollars without wine.
Dundarave Fish Market (2423 Marine Drive, 604-922-1155) is a good choice for lunch in Munro's West Vancouver neighborhood. The fare is pretty much what you'd expect from the name — fish and chips, oysters, crab cakes, chowders, fish burgers. Lunch for two without wine will run about 30 Canadian dollars.
WHERE TO STAY
The Sylvia Hotel (1154 Gilford Street, 604-681-9321; www.sylviahotel.com) though it could use some sprucing up, is still the hotel of choice for Vancouver literati — and Ms. Munro has been spotted here. The location in the West End on English Bay at the edge of Stanley Park is unbeatable. Mid-season doubles run from 99 to 159 Canadian dollars.
The Buchan Hotel (1906 Haro Street, 604-685-5354; www.buchanhotel.com) also has a very Munro feel to it — a 1926 house steps from Stanley Park. Rooms are chilly in winter and bare bones (no phones). High season doubles run from 98 to 135 Canadian dollars.
The West End Guest House (1362 Haro Street, 888-546-3327 or 604-681-2889; www.westendguesthouse.com) is a lovely, cozy B & B . Winter rates range from 85 to 214 Canadian dollars, including full breakfast.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Audio: Alice Munro reads from the title story from her short-story collection, "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage."
Dan Lamont for The New York Times
Lovers kiss at Prospect Point in Stanley Park, where Alice Munro set a scene in "What Is Remembered."
Dan Lamont for The New York Times
The view from Dundarave Park toward the Lions Gate Bridge. Alice and Jim moved into the dark downstairs of a three-story rental on Arbutus Street right across from the beach in the Kitsilano neighborhood — and the building, No. 1316, is still there, in need of a paint job, on a street of "high wooden houses crammed with people living tight." Cross the street, stroll out on the packed sand, and the brooding immensity of Burrard Inlet and the coastal mountains engulfs you; a 10-minute drive across the Burrard Bridge and you're cruising through downtown's smorgasbord of world cuisine and high-end retail. Yet Kitsilano seems blithely unaware of its world-class setting.
"Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known," Ms. Munro writes in "Cortes Island," a story in her 1978 collection "The Love of a Good Woman" that matches detail for detail with her first months in Kits. "No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind." After a day of wandering the city vaguely looking for work, the story's nameless narrator (dubbed Little Bride by one of the other characters) returns to Kits Beach at dusk as "the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun's setting — and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight."
The clouds were scarcer, the light stronger on the January afternoon I prowled around Kits — but otherwise Ms. Munro has nailed the scene. I can perfectly imagine the struggling young writer stretched on her bed in the tiny dark bedroom bolting down Colette and Henry Green or bending over a notebook at the kitchen table, as the Little Bride in "Cortes Island" does, "filling page after page with failure."
No sign of anguished artistes the day of my visit. Fit young women jog through the park. A spread of fruit and pastry awaits a hungry movie crew outside the trendy Watermark Restaurant (Vancouver has become a big movie-making town in recent years). I stroll a few blocks up from the beach to Fourth Avenue — 30 years ago the main drag of Vancouver's counterculture (the scoundrel hippie brother in Ms. Munro's story "Forgiveness in Families" lived around here in a house full of smiling Hare Krishna-type priests), but now as bright and tony as New York's Columbus Avenue or San Francisco's Fillmore Street. The one holdover from Ms. Munro's time is Duthie Books at 2239 West Fourth Street — a literary bookstore that once had branches all over the city but has recently retreated to this one last thoroughly gentrified location.
The Munros' Kitsilano chapter was brief. By 1953 the couple had decamped to the North Shore suburbs just across the Lions Gate Bridge — first to a rather drab tract house in rainy North Vancouver, and then to a nicer place with a big front garden perched on a slope in the Dundarave section of West Vancouver. Two daughters arrived in quick succession (a third died the day she was born). The family lived in Dundarave for the next seven years, Jim commuting to his job downtown, Alice attempting to keep her art alive while managing the household.
The West Vancouver setting crops up again and again in Ms. Munro's stories — but it's always colored by the strain she was under in those years. "When I got home from school my mother would be sitting in that chair in the living room in the dark," Ms. Munro's daughter Sheila recalls. "She had great promise — she had published some stories — but she didn't know if she would continue to do it. She just wanted to be left alone to write."
The Dundarave house is still there — it's at 2749 Lawson Avenue — and so is the shopping block on Marine Drive where Ms. Munro used to walk (she never learned to drive) to do her marketing or to work in the office she rented for a while or to take Sheila to ballet class. Sheila remembers the block of shops as wonderfully ordinary — a hardware store, grocery store, cleaners and a Chinese restaurant.
But some of Vancouver's new-found cool has wafted across the water and today downtown Dundarave has a bit of the air of Sausalito — galleries and coffee places, chowder and sushi, a scattering of petals on the sidewalk outside the florist. In summer it would be the perfect place to grab a cappuccino, assemble a picnic and then head for the beach, two blocks away at Dundarave Pier or a hop east at Ambleside.
"Kath and Sonje have a place of their own on the beach, behind some large logs," opens "Jakarta," one of Ms. Munro's most memorable Vancouver stories from "The Love of a Good Woman" collection. It's unmistakably Ambleside Beach — though faux Mediterranean palazzi have muscled out most of the cottages that line the shore in Ms. Munro's story. From their outpost behind the logs, Kath and Sonje clutch their D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield and eye the gaggle of blowsy, noisy housewives they dub the Monicas:
"These women aren't so much older than Kath and Sonje. But they've reached a stage in life that Kath and Sonje dread. They turn the whole beach into a platform. Their burdens, their strung-out progeny and maternal poundage, their authority, can annihilate the bright water, the perfect small cove with the red-limbed arbutus trees, the cedars, growing crookedly out of the high rocks. Kath feels their threat particularly, since she's a mother now herself. When she nurses her baby she often reads a book, sometimes smokes a cigarette, so as not to sink into a sludge of animal functions."
This is pure Munro: the social anxiety, the fusing of insecurity and disdain, the heavy tug of ordinary life, the way dread can rise and spread until it erases everything lovely. "She's always dead on," Sheila Munro says when I ask if the descriptions of places ring true to her childhood memories. And yet it strikes me when I walk out on Ambleside pier that Ms. Munro has neglected to mention this stupendous setting — the echoing curves of bridge and cove and mountain, the dull silver of the sea, the green-black hump of Stanley Park, all this grandeur of land and water so close it's as if the great northern wilderness laps at the city's feet.
But Ms. Munro was always oppressed, almost crushed by Vancouver's fabled vistas. In the story "Memorial," also set in West Vancouver, a character named Eileen challenges a wealthy foolish man who boasts about his water and mountain view.
"Well suppose you're in a low mood, and you get up and here spread out before you is this magnificent view. All the time, you can't get away from it. Don't you ever feel not up to it?"
"Not up to it?"
"Guilty," said Eileen, persistently though regretfully. "That you're not in a better mood? That you're not more — worthy, of this beautiful view?"
In 1963, the Munros left Dundarave and moved to Victoria to open a bookstore. The marriage broke up nine years later, and Alice returned to Ontario and eventually remarried, but the bookstore is still there — Munro's Books, still run by Jim, still one of the finest in Canada.
Alice never again lived in Vancouver though she does visit to collect prizes and still occasionally sets a story there. "What Is Remembered," from the 2001 collection "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," is one of her best and touches on all of her totemic Vancouver spots. Meriel, the young wife at the center of the story, is at a funeral in Dundarave when a man unknown to her, a doctor and bush pilot from the far north, offers to drive her on a visit to a distant suburb. All afternoon, sexual tension mounts until the pilot pulls over at the Prospect Point viewing area in Stanley Park, and the two strangers get out of the car and start wildly kissing.
Ms. Munro brings them to the glass-bricked entrance of a "small, decent building" in Kitsilano, but while they consummate their mad upsurge of passion in a borrowed flat, she cuts away to describe the setting Meriel would have preferred for adultery: "A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins."
It's just the kind of place Ms. Munro herself prefers — places like the Buchan Hotel, tucked away on a leafy side street near Stanley Park, or the ivy-covered Sylvia Hotel overlooking English Bay. By a stroke of literary magic, Ms. Munro makes an afternoon of adultery in Kitsilano all the more electric by having it happen off stage and in the wrong place, the wrong part of town, the wrong kind of bedroom.
In a way, it's a perfect metaphor for Ms. Munro's own relationship to Vancouver. For her, this was always the wrong place — the views too grand, the weather too gray, the trees too tall. She never cared for the stodgy repressed Vancouver of the 1950's and by all accounts she hasn't warmed much more to the sleek city of today. And yet, after you read her Vancouver stories, you sense her watchful, uprooted presence everywhere. It's a sign of Ms. Munro's greatness as a writer that she so pervades a place that she never really surrendered herself to.
IF YOU GO
WHERE TO EAT
Watermark (1305 Arbutus Street, 604-738-5487) is on the beach in Kitsilano, across the street from the Munros' first Vancouver home. The food, like roasted duck breast and lobster ravioli, is far trendier than anything in Ms. Munro's stories. Dinner for two without wine will run about 80 Canadian dollars (about $74 at 1.08 Canadian dollars to $1).
Bishop's Restaurant (2183 West Fourth Avenue, 604-738-2025) is the place for a classy splurge in Kitsilano. Vancouver's well-heeled artsy sophisticates dine here on organic regional produce and seafood — crab cakes, Pacific squid, steamed smoked sablefish — as well as Fraser Valley lamb with fingerling potatoes. Lots of flowers and local art. Dinner for two will run about 120 Canadian dollars without wine.
Dundarave Fish Market (2423 Marine Drive, 604-922-1155) is a good choice for lunch in Munro's West Vancouver neighborhood. The fare is pretty much what you'd expect from the name — fish and chips, oysters, crab cakes, chowders, fish burgers. Lunch for two without wine will run about 30 Canadian dollars.
WHERE TO STAY
The Sylvia Hotel (1154 Gilford Street, 604-681-9321; www.sylviahotel.com) though it could use some sprucing up, is still the hotel of choice for Vancouver literati — and Ms. Munro has been spotted here. The location in the West End on English Bay at the edge of Stanley Park is unbeatable. Mid-season doubles run from 99 to 159 Canadian dollars.
The Buchan Hotel (1906 Haro Street, 604-685-5354; www.buchanhotel.com) also has a very Munro feel to it — a 1926 house steps from Stanley Park. Rooms are chilly in winter and bare bones (no phones). High season doubles run from 98 to 135 Canadian dollars.
The West End Guest House (1362 Haro Street, 888-546-3327 or 604-681-2889; www.westendguesthouse.com) is a lovely, cozy B & B . Winter rates range from 85 to 214 Canadian dollars, including full breakfast.
FILM
True Love
The Canadian actress Sarah Polley is the antithesis of a slick starlet: she is earnest, thoughtful and thrifty. Her new film, “Away from Her,” conveys those qualities perfectly, says A.O. Scott. Based on an Alice Munro story about the effects of Alzheimer’s on a long-married couple (Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie, in a rare film role ) it “is by turns sharp and somber, alive to the lacerations of ordinary experience and quietly attentive to grand absurdities and small instances of grace,” Scott says. “I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.”100 Notable Books of 2012
The year's notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
100 Notable Books of 2012
Published: November 27, 2012
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Julia Rothman
Related
-
The 10 Best Books of 2012 (December 9, 2012)
-
Sunday Book Review: Children's Books: Notable Children’s Books of 2012 (December 2, 2012)
Illustration by Julia Rothman
FICTION & POETRY
ALIF THE UNSEEN. By G. Willow Wilson. (Grove, $25.) A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.
ALMOST NEVER. By Daniel Sada. Translated by Katherine Silver. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this glorious satire of machismo, a Mexican agronomist simultaneously pursues a prostitute and an upright woman.
AN AMERICAN SPY. By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.)
In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage,
Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.
ARCADIA. By Lauren Groff. (Voice/Hyperion, $25.99.)
Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and
links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.
AT LAST. By Edward St. Aubyn. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)
The final and most meditative of St. Aubyn’s brilliant Patrick Melrose
novels is full of precise observations and glistening turns of phrase.
BEAUTIFUL RUINS. By Jess Walter. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.)
Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals an
American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and disappointed hopes.
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK. By Ben Fountain. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) The survivors of a fierce firefight in Iraq are whisked stateside for a brief victory tour in this satirical novel.
BLASPHEMY. By Sherman Alexie. (Grove, $27.)
The best stories in Alexie’s collection of new and selected works are
moving and funny, bringing together the embittered critic and the
yearning dreamer.
THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF: New and Selected Stories. By Steve Stern. (Graywolf, $26.) Jewish immigrant lives observed with effusive nostalgia.
BRING UP THE BODIES. By Hilary Mantel. (Macrae/Holt, $28.)
Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and
makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.
BUILDING STORIES. By Chris Ware. (Pantheon, $50.)
A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a
tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic
novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.
BY BLOOD. By Ellen Ullman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)
This smart, slippery novel is a narrative striptease, as a professor
listens in on the sessions between the therapist next door and her
patients.
CANADA. By Richard Ford. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.)
A boy whose parents rob a bank in North Dakota in 1960 takes refuge
across the border in this mesmerizing novel, driven by fully realized
characters and an accomplished prose style.
CARRY THE ONE. By Carol Anshaw. (Simon & Schuster, $25.)
Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound
together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.
CITY OF BOHANE. By Kevin Barry. (Graywolf, $25.)
Somewhere in Ireland in 2053, people are haunted by a “lost time,” when
something calamitous happened, and hope to reclaim the past. Barry’s
extraordinary, exuberant first novel is full of inventive language.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Jack Gilbert. (Knopf, $35.) In orderly free verse constructions, Gilbert deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal and lust.
DEAR LIFE: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $26.95.)
This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her
striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her
whole career.
THE DEVIL IN SILVER. By Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) LaValle’s culturally observant third novel is set in a shabby urban mental hospital.
ENCHANTMENTS. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $27.)
Harrison’s splendid and surprising novel of late imperial Russia
centers on Rasputin’s daughter Masha and the hemophiliac czarevitch
Alyosha.
FLIGHT BEHAVIOR. By Barbara Kingsolver. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies in this brave and majestic novel.
FOBBIT. By David Abrams. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $15.) Clerks, cooks and lawyers at a forward operating base in Iraq populate this first novel.
THE FORGETTING TREE. By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.)
In Soli’s haunting second novel, a mysterious Caribbean woman cares for
a cancer patient on an isolated California ranch.
GATHERING OF WATERS. By Bernice L. McFadden. (Akashic, $24.95.) Three generations of black women confront floods and murder in Mississippi.
GODS WITHOUT MEN. By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.)
Related stories, spanning centuries and continents, and all tethered to
a desert rock formation, emphasize interconnectivity across time and
space in Kunzru’s relentlessly modern fourth novel.
HHhH. By Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)
This gripping novel examines both the killing of an SS general in
Prague in 1942 and Binet’s experience in writing about it.
A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $25.)
Eggers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America
in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had
stakes and people worked with their hands.
HOME. By Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $24.)
A black Korean War veteran, discharged from an integrated Army into a
segregated homeland, makes a reluctant journey back to Georgia in a
novel engaged with themes that have long haunted Morrison.
HOPE: A TRAGEDY. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $26.95.)
Hilarity alternates with pain in this novel about a Jewish man seeking
peace in upstate New York who discovers Anne Frank in his attic.
HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? By Sheila Heti. (Holt, $25.) The narrator (also named Sheila) and her friends try to answer the question in this novel’s title.
IN ONE PERSON. By John Irving. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Irving’s
funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his
sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.
A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME. By Wiley Cash. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99.) An evil pastor dominates Cash’s mesmerizing first novel.
MARRIED LOVE: And Other Stories. By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s understatedly beautiful collection is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class.
NW. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.)
The lives of two friends who grew up in a northwest London housing
project diverge, illuminating questions of race, class, sexual identity
and personal choice, in Smith’s energetic modernist novel.
ON THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE DEATHS. By Lucia Perillo. (Copper Canyon, $22.) Taut, lucid poems filled with complex emotional reflection.
PURE. By Julianna Baggott. (Grand Central, $25.99.) Children battle for the planet’s redemption in this precisely written postapocalyptic adventure story.
THE RIGHT-HAND SHORE. By Christopher Tilghman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A dark, magisterial novel set on a Chesapeake Bay estate.
THE ROUND HOUSE. By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) In this novel, an American Indian family faces the ramifications of a vicious crime.
SALVAGE THE BONES. By Jesmyn Ward. (Bloomsbury, $24.) A pregnant 15-year-old and her family await Hurricane Katrina in this lushly written novel.
SAN MIGUEL. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $27.95.)
Two utopians from different eras establish private idylls on
California’s desolate Channel Islands; this novel preserves their
tantalizing dreams.
SHINE SHINE SHINE. By Lydia Netzer. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) This thought-provoking debut novel presents a geeky astronaut and his pregnant wife.
SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME. By Natalie Serber. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) The stories in Serber’s first collection are smart and nuanced.
SILENT HOUSE. By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Robert Finn. (Knopf, $26.95.)
A family is a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup in this
intense, foreboding novel, first published in Turkey in 1983.
THE STARBOARD SEA. By Amber Dermont. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.)
Dermont’s captivating debut novel, whose narrator is a boarding school
student and a sailor, takes pleasure in the sea and in the exhilarating
freedom of being young.
SWEET TOOTH. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.)
The true subject of this smart and tricky novel, set inside a cold war
espionage operation, is the border between make-believe and reality.
SWIMMING HOME. By Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.) In this spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, a troubled young woman tests the marriages of two couples.
TELEGRAPH AVENUE. By Michael Chabon. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)
Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and
Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture
references in astonishing prose.
THE TESTAMENT OF MARY. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $19.99.)
This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and
its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $26.95.)
The stories in this collection are about love, but they’re also about
the undertow of family history and cultural mores, presented in Díaz’s
exciting, irresistible and entertaining prose.
THREE STRONG WOMEN. By Marie NDiaye. Translated by John Fletcher. (Knopf, $25.95.)
In loosely linked narratives, three women from Senegal struggle with
fathers and husbands in France. This subtle, hypnotic novel won the Prix
Goncourt in 2009.
TOBY’S ROOM. By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $25.95.) This novel, a sequel to “Life Class,” delves further into the lives of an English family torn apart by World War I.
WATERGATE. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $26.95.)
This novelistic reimagining of the “third-rate burglary” proposes
surprising motives for the break-in and the 18-minute gap, and has a
sympathetic Nixon.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK: Stories. By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $24.95.)
Englander tackles large questions of morality and history in a masterly
collection that manages to be both insightful and uproarious.
THE YELLOW BIRDS. By Kevin Powers. (Little, Brown, $24.99.)
A young private and his platoon struggle through the war in Iraq but
find no peace at home in this powerful and moving first novel about the
frailty of man and the brutality of war.
NONFICTION
ALL WE KNOW: Three Lives. By Lisa Cohen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)
The vanished world of midcentury upper-class lesbians is portrayed as
beguiling, its inhabitants members of a stylish club.
AMERICAN TAPESTRY: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama. By Rachel L. Swarns. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A Times reporter’s deeply researched chronicle of several generations of Mrs. Obama’s family.
AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf. By James Dodson. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author evokes an era when the game was more vivid and less corporate than it seems now.
ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A Comic Drama. By Alison Bechdel. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.
BARACK OBAMA: The Story. By David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, $32.50.)
This huge and absorbing new biography, full of previously unexplored
detail, shows that Obama’s saga is more surprising and gripping than the
version we’re familiar with.
BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. By Katherine Boo. (Random House, $27.)
This extraordinary moral inquiry into life in an Indian slum shows the
human costs exacted by a brutal social Darwinism.
BELZONI: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate. By Ivor Noël Hume. (University of Virginia, $34.95.)
The fascinating tale of the 19th-century Italian monk, a “notorious
tomb robber,” who gathered archaeological treasures in Egypt while
crunching bones underfoot.
THE BLACK COUNT: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss. (Crown, $27.) The first Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race general of the French Revolution, is the subject of this imaginative biography.
BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History. By Florence Williams. (Norton, $25.95.) Williams’s environmental call to arms deplores chemicals in breast milk and the vogue for silicone implants.
COMING APART: The State of White America, 1960-2010. By Charles Murray. (Crown Forum, $27.) The author of “The Bell Curve” warns that the white working class has abandoned the “founding virtues.”
DARWIN’S GHOSTS: The Secret History of Evolution. By Rebecca Stott. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) Stott’s lively, original history of evolutionary ideas flows easily across continents and centuries.
A
DISPOSITION TO BE RICH: How a Small-Town Preacher’s Son Ruined an
American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the
Best-Hated Man in the United States. By Geoffrey C. Ward. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author’s ancestor was the bane of Ulysses S. Grant.
FAR FROM THE TREE: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $37.50.)
This passionate and affecting work about what it means to be a parent
is based on interviews with families of “exceptional” children.
FLAGRANT CONDUCT. The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans. By Dale Carpenter. (Norton, $29.95.) Carpenter stirringly describes the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Texas sodomy law.
THE FOLLY OF FOOLS: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. By Robert Trivers. (Basic Books, $28.) An intriguing argument that deceit is a beneficial evolutionary “deep feature” of life.
THE GREY ALBUM: On the Blackness of Blackness. By Kevin Young. (Graywolf, paper, $25.)
A poet’s lively account of the central place of the trickster figure in
black American culture could have been called “How Blacks Invented
America.”
HAITI: The Aftershocks of History. By Laurent Dubois. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.)
Foreign meddling, the lack of a democratic tradition, a humiliating
American occupation and cold-war support of a brutal dictator all figure
in a scholar’s well-written analysis.
HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. By Paul Tough. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.)
Noncognitive skills like persistence and self-control are more crucial
to success than sheer brainpower, Tough maintains.
HOW MUSIC WORKS. By David Byrne. (McSweeney’s, $32.) This guidebook also explores the eccentric rock star’s personal and professional experience.
IRON CURTAIN: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. By Anne Applebaum. (Doubleday, $35.) An overwhelming and convincing account of the Soviet push to colonize Eastern Europe after World War II.
KAYAK MORNING: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. By Roger Rosenblatt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, paper, $13.99.) This thoughtful meditation on the evolution of grief over time asks the big questions.
LINCOLN’S CODE: The Laws of War in American History. By John Fabian Witt. (Free Press, $32.) A tension between humanitarianism and righteousness has shaped America’s rules of warfare.
LITTLE AMERICA: The War Within the War for Afghanistan. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $27.95.) A beautifully written and deeply reported account of America’s troubled involvement in Afghanistan.
MEMOIR OF A DEBULKED WOMAN: Enduring Ovarian Cancer. By Susan Gubar. (Norton, $24.95.)
A feminist scholar recounts her experience and criticizes the medical
treatment of a frightening disease in a voice that is straightforward
and incredibly brave.
MY POETS. By Maureen N. McLane. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)
Part memoir and part criticism, this friendly book includes essays on
poets canonical and contemporary, as well as lineated poem-games.
THE OBAMAS. By Jodi Kantor. (Little, Brown, $29.99.)
Michelle Obama sets the tone and tempo of the current White House,
Kantor argues in this admiring account, full of colorful insider
anecdotes.
ODDLY NORMAL: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality. By John Schwartz. (Gotham, $26.)
A Times reporter’s deeply affecting account of his son’s coming out
also reviews research on the experience of LGBT kids.
ON A FARTHER SHORE: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. By William Souder. (Crown, $30.) An absorbing biography of the pioneering environmental writer on the 50th anniversary of “Silent Spring.”
ON SAUDI ARABIA: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future. By Karen Elliott House. (Knopf, $28.95.)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist unveils this inscrutable country,
comparing its calcified regime to the Soviet Union in its final days.
THE ONE: The Life and Music of James Brown. By RJ Smith. (Gotham, $27.50.)
Smith argues that Brown was the most significant modern American
musician in terms of style, messaging, rhythm and originality.
THE PASSAGE OF POWER: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. By Robert A. Caro. (Knopf, $35.)
The fourth volume of Caro’s magisterial work spans the five years that
end shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, as Johnson prepares to push
for a civil rights act.
THE PATRIARCH: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. By David Nasaw. (Penguin Press, $40.)
This riveting history captures the sweep of Kennedy’s life — as Wall
Street speculator, moviemaker, ambassador and dynastic founder.
PEOPLE
WHO EAT DARKNESS: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the
Streets of Tokyo — and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up. By Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) An evenhanded investigation of a murder.
RED BRICK, BLACK MOUNTAIN, WHITE CLAY: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival. By Christopher Benfey. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Mixing memoir, family saga, travelogue and cultural history.
RULE AND RUIN. The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. By Geoffrey Kabaservice. (Oxford University, $29.95.) Pragmatic Republicanism was hardier than we remember, Kabaservice argues.
SAUL STEINBERG: A Biography. By Deirdre Bair. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $40.) A gripping and revelatory biography of the eminent cartoonist.
SHOOTING VICTORIA: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy. By Paul Thomas Murphy. (Pegasus, $35.) An uninhibited and learned account of the attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, which only increased her popularity.
SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. By Timothy Egan. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) A deft portrait of the man who made memorable photographs of American Indians.
THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH. By Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $27.95.) The evolutionary biologist explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects.
SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider. By Zakes Mda. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The South African novelist and playwright absorbingly illuminates his wide, worldly life.
SPILLOVER: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. By David Quammen. (Norton, $28.95.)
Quammen’s meaty, sprawling book chronicles his globe-trotting
scientific adventures and warns against animal microbes spilling over
into people.
THE TASTE OF WAR: World War II and the Battle for Food. By Lizzie Collingham. (Penguin Press, $36.) Collingham argues that food needs contributed to the war’s origins, strategy, outcome and aftermath.
THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power. By Jon Meacham. (Random House, $35.)
This readable and well-researched life celebrates Jefferson’s skills as
a practical politician, unafraid to wield power even when it conflicted
with his small-government views.
VICTORY: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. By Linda Hirshman. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.)
Written with knowing finesse, this expansive history of gay rights from
the early 20th century to the present draws on archives and interviews.
WHEN GOD TALKS BACK: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God. By T. M. Luhrmann. (Knopf, $28.95.)
Evangelicals believe that God speaks to them personally because they
hone the skill of prayer, this insightful study argues.
WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $25.)
Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from
adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.
WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? An Existential Detective Story. By Jim Holt. (Liveright/Norton, $27.95.)
An elegant and witty writer converses with philosophers and
cosmologists who ponder why there is something rather than nothing.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 30, 2012
An earlier version of this list misidentified the state in which the parents of the narrator of Richard Ford’s novel “Canada” rob a bank. It is not Montana.
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