Heller McAlpin
Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
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The Secret Life of a Cemetery is a paean to the renowned Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. There, 10,000 visitors a day seek the graves of some 4,500 notable figures. -
Didion's book is an intimate chronicle of the author's struggle to help her daughter, even if it meant digging into her own long-unexamined neuroses. -
Set during a uniquely stressful summer for one Nantucket family, Gabriella Burnham's second novel highlights the strong bonds between a mom and her daughters. -
In a heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín's handles uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging through time to a devastating climax. -
Talk about a dream, kill a conversation. But not in the case of graphic novelist Roz Chast. Even her subconscious emanations present deliciously skewed takes on life's absurdities and fraught moments. -
The writer W. Somerset Maugham plays a central role Tan Twan Eng's entrancing new novel that encompasses at-the-time risky interracial and homosexual love stories and a scandalous murder trial. -
In her return to short stories, the Interpreter of Maladies author returns to fiction that powerfully conveys her characters' efforts to navigate geography and culture to find a place in the world. -
Lydia Davis' focus has shifted largely from issues of parenting and domestic relationships to aspects of aging — but the results are as penetrating as anything she's written. -
Daniel Mason's gorgeous fifth novel tells of a yellow house deep in the woods of western Massachusetts — and its motley succession of occupants who leave their mark on the property. -
We've seen jealous, possessive friends and housewreckers with no boundaries before, though perhaps not quite so thoroughly, unapologetically unlikeable as in Ore Agbaje-Williams's debut novel.
