Holy Water
James P. Othmer
Friend of the blog, JPO’s enormously fun satire is one of my recommendations for paperback reading this summer. Here’s what I said last year: “The smug wink-and-nod cynicism and their unraveling is reminiscent of Revolutionary Road, but, you know, really funny, including an excrutiating, more than you want to know account of vasectomies.” JE reviewed it too, and put it on his Manly Books of the Year list.
The Oregon Experiment
Keith Scribner
Jennifer Tyler reviewed this just yesterday. How about that?
Private Life
Jane Smiley
Smiley lost me with Three Days in the Hills, but I often like her a lot. This looks great to me. I’ll read it if one comes my way.
All that Follows
Jim Crace
Leonard Lessing is a British jazz musician whose life has become largely predictable and stagnant. While watching the news one night he recognizes a man who is holding four hostages.
 
American Music
Jane Mendelsohn
In her exquisite, psychologically fluent novels, the actual and imagined merge as Mendelsohn tests the power of stories to define, guide, and sometimes destroy us. Her third novel is an intricate puzzle of haunting, far-reaching, secretly connected love stories…. Sensuously rendered.” —Booklist
 
The Astral
Kate Christensen
We’ve written about Kate Christensen a lot over the years. In fact, you can read her interview with Dennis today. If you look around you can find reviews of The Astral and Trouble, and the Three Guys treatment of The Great Man
Elliot Allagash
Simon Rich
Simon Rich stopped by 3G1B last year with a WWFIL piece about Roald Dahl: “Luckily, like the alcohol prohibition of 1919, the TV rules were completely unenforceable. All I had to do was hold a book in my lap while watching my shows.” Read the rest here.
Break the Skin
Lee Martin
“Martin, whose kidnap novel The Bright Forever (2005) was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, expertly applies shades of James Cain–like noir to modern story that might have been inspired by one of the Lucinda Williams songs on this book’s soundtrack.” —Kirkus Reviews
Sounds great. Awful cover.