Novels Now

It was just after dark in a lonely reach of the South Pacific. As we sped westward, the ocean floor was a mile below us - or it was supposed to be. Like when microphone feedback suddenly fills an auditorium until you must cover your ears, a deafening shrill exploded through the boat. […]

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North to Alaska the land rises gently from the Arctic Ocean and an ice pack that extends over the pole and beyond. South of Patagonia, it plunges into the Drake Passage at Cape Horn. Six hundred miles away is Antarctica. Start at one of these ends of the earth - if only in your mind […]

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The rabbi shrugged. “Faith is hard, Rosa. Nonbelievers often speak of faith as if it were something easy, a cop-out from the really tough business of confronting a meaningless universe, but it’s not. It’s doubt that’s easy. - From The Believers-
When Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff - a radical American lawyer -  at a […]

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A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don’t have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son. -From An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, page 6-
Author Elizabeth McCracken lived briefly in France, with her husband, […]

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These were adults with too much time on their hands. And didn’t they know that the projector, sound system, and speakers were all Japanese? Their dancing shoes were probably from Mexico or China. America’s jobs were going elsewhere and Americans were just dressing up and playing like kids. Gas prices were high. General Motors […]

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Everybody lies. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Clients lie. Even jurors lie. There is a school of belief in criminal law that every trial is won or lost in the choosing of the jury. I’ve never been ready to go all the way to that level but I do know that there is probably no […]

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Jars line my cellar shelves. Some are filled with fists of yellow-veined tomatoes. Others hold small onions and chopped leeks, white pearls floating in an opaque sea. Sometimes the light falls on a jar of boiled quail or the slick, dark meat of a rabbit. There are unexpected moments when I see the slit […]

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Mike got up off the floor and sat on the sofa while he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, as if increasing the blog flow to the brain might help solve his problem. And it was then that the word containment entered his mind. And with that word, moral, […]

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Two women were standing on high places, shielding their eyes from the blazing sun with their hands, peering into the distance in search of messengers from the battlefield. Each knew that her life depended on the outcome of the battle; but their lives depended on opposite results. -From The Triumph of Deborah, page 1-
The […]

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She had conceived children in that house, suffered a miscarriage in that house, brought her babies home there, argued with her husband there, made love, rejoiced, despaired, sipped tea, and gossiped and sobbed and counseled and blessed her friends there, walked the halls with sick children there, and scrubbed the worn brick of the […]

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