A Novel Concept

By Michael Malone Kurt Vonnegut is an unassailable American cultural hero. There’s Slaughterhouse-Five, about Billy Pilgrim traveling through time, and the firebombing of Dresden. There’s Galapagos, about apocalypse survivors in the Galapagos Islands who start a new human race. There’s

I truly loved Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s bizarre novel about a family of carnival freaks. The Binewski family includes parents who shape their collection of oddballs, such as a boy with flippers for limbs, Siamese twins and an albino hunchback,

Afterparties, a collection of nine somewhat connected short stories detailing the lives of Cambodian-Americans in California, was written by Anthony Veasna So. One can’t help but read the book with a sense of sadness, because So died, at 28, of

By Michael Malone Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story is U2 singer Bono’s life story, set amidst the framework of 40 U2 songs, including old ones like “Out of Control” and “I Will Follow”, and newer stuff such as “Breathe” and

By Michael Malone Maybe you’re like me. Your kids bring home a novel they’re reading for school, and you start to think about when you read it in school, and you wonder how it holds up.  It happened to me

What I’m reading, and why By Michael Malone I break from my column’s moniker to share about a non-fiction book, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar. It is about Matar’s journey home to Libya