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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Departure(s) explores several of Barnes' lifelong obsessions — mortality, memory, and time. It's slim but weighty, digressive yet incisive. Barnes, who just turned 80, says it will be his last. -
America's literary highways may be plenty crowded with middle-aged runaways fleeing lives that increasingly feel like a bad fit. But Ben Markovits adds a moving tale to the collection. -
The punk rock star has produced several books that braid thoughts on her newest endeavors with memories and photographs of her lost lovers and friends. Bread of Angels is her most autobiographical. -
In this follow-up to her hit novel, Catherine Newman reprises her beloved Rocky, a sharp-witted, neurotically doting mother. -
This novel stands apart from other tales of mothers stretched too thin. Jessica Stanley weaves family frustrations with British politics and global events because our life and our times are connected. -
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. -
With her new essay collection, Jamison reverses the arc of The Empathy Exams by moving from the external to the internal, from others' longings and hauntings to her own.
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R.L. Maizes' new story collection is a quirky mix of humor, gravity and warmth. She's drawn to outsiders who yearn for connection and who display behaviors and feelings they're not proud of.
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Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story, about a young Vietnamese American writer whose fractured family was torn by their experiences during the Vietnam War.
