Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest and the author of several novels including “A Tale for the Time Being,” which was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize. Her latest, “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” is an inventive novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things.
This week, Former flight attendant T. J. Newman wrote much of her new novel, “Falling,” on cross-country red-eye flights while her passengers were asleep. “Falling” follows pilot Bill Hoffman after he’s been given an impossible choice: crash the plane he’s currently flying, or let his kidnapped family die. Photo courtesy of Avid Reader Press. ...
For seven years, journalist and New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold reported and wrote the story of how fracking in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale forever altered the lives of Stacey Haney, her daughter, Paige and her son, Harley. Griswold’s book, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” just received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. ...
In Gish Jen’s latest “The Resisters,” we meet Gwen who has a Golden Arm and finds herself happily playing in an underground baseball league in her teens. It is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value as well as their very existence. ...