Word: farrar
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...past masterpieces whose greatness their subsequent work did not approach. For others, it's just a very prestigious distraction. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 laureate, complained that the prize destroyed her cherished privacy by turning her into an "official person." According to Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Gordimer's and Walcott's publisher), the prize can "inundate" a writer. "People," he says, "want a piece of your ass even more than they did before...
...funny man (a hopeless, lifelong drunk), is dead in middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes...
...mention of any of this on Sullivan's Island--just beach homes and speedboats bobbing in the sun. "The reason people are afraid to talk about slavery is the terrible truth of someplace like this," says Ball. He learned of the pest houses while writing Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), his chronicle of his slave-owning family and the blacks they held. "Look at this," he sighs. "The story has absolutely been erased...
...realize, was merely a limited, self-absorbed woman. But in book after book (notably a brilliant, tormented novel, The Autobiography of My Mother), Kincaid displays the wounds of her unhappy childhood as a poor, bookish black girl in Antigua. Her new volume, an irritating navel contemplation titled My Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $19), repeats the pattern of familiar, well-written complaint. (Opinions differ; in what appears to be a makeup call for earlier, fresher books overlooked, My Brother has been nominated for a National Book Award...
...apart, as indicated by the range of Eisenberg's new collection, All Around Atlantis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 244 pages; $23). Anna, of the title story, recalls her childhood living with her mother and the buried memories of aunts and uncles who died in Hitler's death camps. Overheard scraps of dinner-table conversation are not enough to reconstruct the past, so Anna uses her imagination. She starts by picturing a single barb on a wire, "its taper, its point, its torque, its dull gleam...