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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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.
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For decades, Quindlen has been channeling Baby Boomers' concerns, from motherhood and life-work balance to aging and downsizing. Her new book comes with a stern warning: Grandparents, know thy place.
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Ian McEwan imagines an alternate, technologically-advanced 1982 England in his new novel, in which the development of lifelike, artificially intelligent cyborgs leads to some uncomfortable questions.
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Leslie Jamison's new book of essays, The Empathy Exams, combines the intellectual and the emotional to explore the humanizing effect of empathy. Heller McAlpin calls it a "soaring performance."
