Harvey Freedenberg
Content by Harvey Freedenberg
-
Danish novelist Peter Høeg, author of the acclaimed bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, returns with his first work in 10 years, the dense and enigmatic novel <
Read more »
-
Joining a distinguished list of predecessors who’ve re-imagined Shakespeare’s work, in his third novel, Chris Adrian, one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” o
Read more »
-
In his latest collection of never-before-published stories, Stephen King proves once again that he has no equal at delivering chills.
Read more »
-
There’s an unavoidable risk in basing a novel on recent events like the 2008 financial crisis, since the drama of real life usually outruns the imagination of even the most talented writer.
Read more »
-
You don’t have to like baseball to savor Chad Harbach’s sumptuous debut novel, a wise and tender story of love and friendship, ambition and the cruelty of dashed dreams, featuring an ap
Read more »
-
Inspired by a true story, Peter Rock’s fifth novel is the spare, haunting tale of a father and daughter attempting to carve out an independent life while pitted against a society decidedly ho
Read more »
-
It's been seven years since novelist Tony Earley introduced readers to Jim Glass and his small North Carolina town of Aliceville in the acclaimed novel Jim the Boy.
Read more »
-
Forty years into a distinguished acting career, Simon Axler suddenly finds himself bereft of his ability to perform.
Read more »
-
Haley Tanner’s debut novel is a wistful, honest story of friendship and first love as they blossom in the lives of two Russian immigrant children trying to make their way in the confusing new
Read more »
-
Fans of Stephen King's short fiction should be grateful he was selected to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories.
Read more »
-
There’s a palpable sadness attached to the fact that, barring the discovery of unpublished work, this will the final volume of new short stories from John Updike, who died in January.
Read more »
-
Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields.
Read more »
-
How far would you go to rescue a sibling hurtling down the path to self-destruction?
Read more »
-
Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s?
Read more »
-
One only has to hear the name of Sasha Goldberg's hometown Asbestos 2 to understand the grimness of the life she faces growing up there.
Read more »
-
In our age of infatuation with stars of films and television, the idea of a bright and sensitive young woman attaching herself to an established writer in the hope of spurring him to feats of literar
Read more »
-
In his latest novel, prize-winning author Justin Cartwright offers an absorbing tale of two men from different cultures whose friendship is ruptured by the conflagration of World War II.
Read more »
-
In his elegiac seventh novel, Joseph O’Connor vividly resurrects the love affair between famed Irish playwright John Synge and actress Molly Allgood, the heroine of Synge’s controversia
Read more »
-
In Forgetfulness, his 15th novel in a distinguished career as both a journalist and fiction writer, Ward Just offers a heartbreaking tale that is as contemporary as today's newspaper headl
Read more »
-
Mention the term "identity theft" and you're likely to conjure up images of digital pirates pilfering Social Security and credit card numbers for monetary gain.
Read more »
-
Elie Wiesel’s new work, The Sonderberg Case, is a terse philosophical novel that explores issues of identity, memory and personal responsibility in the shadow of the Holocaus
Read more »
-
To the ranks of memorable literary heroines add the name of Margo Crane, the protagonist of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s passionate new novel, Once Upon a River.
Read more »
-
Fin Dolan, advertising agency copywriter and narrator of John Kenney’s engaging first novel, is approaching his 40th birthday while still “waiting for my life to begin.” That Kenn
Read more »
-
Dominating the cover photograph of Don DeLillo's monumental 1997 novel Underworld are the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, their upper floors obscured by fog or smoke.
Read more »
-
Identity, consciousness and memory are the subjects of the compelling new work by esteemed novelist Richard Powers.
Read more »
-
On a bleak December day in 1907, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz and their four children complete their flight from Kishinev, Russia, and the pogroms that have plagued its Jewish community.
Read more »
-
“All this happened quite a few years ago.” With that unassuming, almost childlike opening sentence, Per Petterson introduces an evocative still-life portrait of the tender, difficult re
Read more »
-
Marie Arana is perhaps best known as the editor of the Washington Post Book World and an accomplished literary critic. Her memoir, American Chica, received widespread acclaim.
Read more »
-
The subject of Ken Kalfus’ startlingly original third novel—a bizarre 19th-century attempt to communicate with the planet Mars from the Egyptian desert—couldn’t be more remo
Read more »
-
Nora Marie Eldridge, the protagonist of Claire Messud’s taut and psychologically astute fourth novel, is an angry woman, a fact she reveals in its first paragraph.
Read more »
-
British mystery and thriller writer Mo Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) will please her growing body of fans with this latest novel, her fourth.
Read more »
-
In Landsman, his first novel, Peter Charles Melman offers a vivid and original Civil War story.
Read more »
-
Although he's an esteemed author in his native Spain and received critical praise here for his 2001 novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina remains largely unk
Read more »
-
When 26-year-old Denny Cullen’s mother dies suddenly, he returns from Wales to his Dublin home to help bury her and mourn her loss.
Read more »
-
Stories of wedding disasters abound, but few can match the hostage-taking that drives the plot of Lisa Zeidner’s witty and compassionate fifth novel, Love Bomb.
Read more »
-
Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of T.C. Boyle's productive career than its unpredictability, something that’s manifest in Wild Child, his ninth collection of short stories.
Read more »
-
In his debut novel, Michael J. White has crafted an affecting story of first love and first loss.
Read more »
-
Karen Russell's startlingly original collection, St.
Read more »
-
Things aren’t going well for Judd Foxman. His wife Jen has been carrying on a torrid affair with his boss.
Read more »
-
Four years after the publication of his short story collection Mothers and Sons and on the heels of his novel Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns with The Empty Fa
Read more »
-
Richard Ford's latest novel represents the long-awaited completion of the trilogy he began with The Sportswriter (1986) and continued with the Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning
Read more »
-
Home Remedies, by Angela Pneuman, offers eight stories that revolve around a unifying theme: the struggle of girls and young women raised in fundamentalist Christian families to resolve the te
Read more »
-
Julie Orringer’s first novel, The Invisible Bridge, is an old-fashioned epic of two families caught in the maelstrom of Europe of the 1930s and ’40s.
Read more »
-
If you can imagine a story that marries the comic sensibility of Woody Allen to the good-natured theology of the Oh, God! movie trilogy, you’ll have a pretty fair idea of what comedy
Read more »
-
Sixty-year-old Rudy Harrington is a man searching for answers.
Read more »
-
Issue:
Nearly 30 years ago, Mark Helprin set his novel Winter’s Tale, an enchanting epic that featured a flying horse and a dazzling array of human characters, in a fantastic and vividly im
Read more »
-
For Americans born after 1955, polio has had about as much immediate emotional impact as the Black Death, and thus it’s hard to conjure up the sense of terror that surrounded any mention of t
Read more »
-
Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harro
Read more »
-
Whether it’s founded on a reputation for rampant crime or the recent travails of the automobile industry, is there any American city more maligned than Detroit?
Read more »
-
Whether it was Edith Wharton at the turn of the 20th century or John Cheever in the 1950s and ’60s, New York City has never lacked for chroniclers of its mores.
Read more »
-
Ian McEwan’s new novel is a stylish and sexy morality play set in the world of British espionage of the early 1970s.
Read more »
-
In 1907, in a small Wisconsin town that bears his name, Ralph Truitt, the wealthy owner of an iron foundry, waits on the cusp of a looming blizzard for the train carrying Catherine Land, his mail-o
Read more »
-
Like his first novel, You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon’s latest is a profound and haunting exploration of the shifting, often tenuous, nature of identity.
Read more »
-
In 1999, A.M. Homes told an interviewer, Life is incredibly surrealistic. Especially where I live, in New York City, the weirdest things happen every day.
Read more »
-
What’s most remarkable about Alice Munro’s latest collection is the vast psychological terrain she covers in just 10 stories, while rarely straying from her home territory of rural Onta
Read more »
-
In her relatively brief career, Jhumpa Lahiri already has carved out a distinctive literary niche.
Read more »
-
Elderly book critic August Brill lies awake, tortured by insomnia in "another white night in the great American wilderness." He has moved into the Vermont home of his divorced daughter, M
Read more »
-
Issue:
Written in 1989 and discovered among the author’s papers after his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich is a moody, atmospheric story of obsession—obse
Read more »
-
With long-established newspapers passing from the scene and many others on life support, it’s the perfect time for a satiric look at the business.
Read more »
-
In his arrestingly titled second novel, Brock Clarke invites us to ponder the spell literature can cast and the sometimes incendiary power of books. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New En
Read more »
-
A gritty urban Milwaukee neighborhood in 1989 hardly seems like a compelling locale for a rich and heartwarming coming-of-age story, but Pauls Toutonghi's debut novel will persuade skeptical readers
Read more »
-
What compels us to cling to hope in hopeless circumstances?
Read more »
-
Published in England in 1998 and now available in the U.S. for the first time, Per Petterson's To Siberia is a worthy successor to his acclaimed 2007 novel, Out Stealing Horses.
Read more »
-
A masterful collection
Read more »
-
Issue:
The year is 2004, and the war in Iraq slogs on, with rising casualties and no sign of the weapons of mass destruction.
Read more »
-
Nine years after the publication of his last novel, Kent Haruf returns with the final volume of what is likely to be thought of, along with its predecessor Eventide and 1999’s Plainsong, as the Holt Trilogy.
Read more »
-
It’s 3 a.m. in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. Can you imagine all the trouble brewing there?
Read more »
-
With his first novel, a story of dislocation and yearning for both the old and the new, David Bezmozgis fulfills the promise he displayed in his 2005 collection, Natasha and Other Stories,
Read more »
-
What if, instead of dying in Auschwitz, Anne Frank had lived, spirited away to America to spend the next 60 years huddled in an attic, tapping out a book she hopes will equal the emotional power of her Diary?
Read more »
-
Unlike Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe in their recent memoirs of marital love and loss, Rafael Yglesias has elected to tell his own similar tale in the form of a painfully honest and passionate autobi
Read more »
-
Fresh from his 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist novel, The Bright Forever, Lee Martin has produced a frank and convincing story of the toll that a long-buried secret exacts on the life of one unre
Read more »
-
After a melodramatic and somewhat disappointing detour to the 1930s in his last novel, The Reserve, Russell Banks has returned with intensity to the territory he staked out for himself in
Read more »
-
Somewhere near the top of the short list of dreaded medical diagnoses is Alzheimer's disease. And how much more tragic is it when that disease strikes someone long before old age has descended?
Read more »
-
Many of Scott Spencer's eight novels have focused on love, in all of its mystifying complexity.
Read more »
-
Aravind Adiga's first novel, The White Tiger, paints a vivid and disturbing picture of life in the strikingly different cultures that comprise modern India.
Read more »
-
Issue:
Jim Crace’s 11th novel is a remorseless allegory exploring the dark side of what we think of as economic progress, as it rudely elbows aside settled ways of life.
Read more »
-
Only a few months ago, our country was immersed in an intense debate over the “Ground Zero” mosque.
Read more »
-
Controversial religious texts are discovered in the Egyptian desert. Unscrupulous men battle to control them, while others ponder their meaning and impact on the Christian faith.
Read more »
-
Ryan Boudinot boasts an MFA from Bennington College and works as an editor at Amazon.com.
Read more »
-
Red Hook Road, the latest novel from Ayelet Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits), begins with an almost unimaginable tragedy—the death of a young couple in a fiery autom
Read more »