Lizzie Skurnick
Lizzie Skurnick's reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and "many other appallingly underpaying publications," she says. Her books blog, Old Hag, is a Forbes Best of the Web pick and has been anthologized in Vintage's Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web. She writes a column on vintage young-adult fiction for Jezebel.com, a job she has been preparing for her entire life. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
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In the author's third Jackson Brodie mystery, a train crash connects a tangle of characters and crimes. The novel explores the line between protectiveness and violent possessiveness.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson returns to the town of Gilead, scene of her last novel. Home has a less meditative tone that suits its younger characters, especially Jack, the wayward son who returns in search of redemption.
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A young man enters a world of power and privilege when he is summoned to live on the estate of the local industrial baron in Ethan Canin's epic America America.
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Former GOP finance director Nicole Sexton's young heroine has a knack for throwing parties and tapping rich donors. But as the former intern becomes a big wheel in the Republican money machine, her ideals take a beating.
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Even the bard wasn't as bawdy or silly as drug-addled scholar "Willie" Shakespeare Greenberg, the fumbling protagonist of Jess Winfield's lovingly naughty academic picaresque, My Name Is Will.
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For her new short-story collection, Lara Vapnyar revisits New York's Brighton Beach and finds the link between food, memory, love and dreams of the future.
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Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed heroine is all grown up. Now a 40-something mother, Cannie Shapiro struggles with anxiety, anger and her teenage daughter. Reviewer Lizzie Skurnick calls the character "equal parts zaftig and Zola."