Word: farrars
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Another, although comparatively muted explosion gets the plot moving in Brown's fifth novel, Half a Heart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 402 pages; $24). The year is 1986, and Miriam Vener, Jewish and in her mid-40s, lives in Houston with her ophthalmologist husband Barry and their three children. Amid the splendors of her gated community and rambling, expensive house, Miriam sports a troubled conscience, for she has another child, a half-black daughter whom she has not seen in nearly 18 years. Her husband knows about this chapter of her life, closed before he met her: the time during...
Still, Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 111 pages; $22) offers a splendid introduction for the uninitiated. Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration both of beauty and of its transience. The subject of love crops up repeatedly in the book's 60 lyrics, but the Boss Cupid of the title is not the chubby winged cherub of popular lore. He is something of a hooligan, "devious master of our bodies," wreaker of joy and havoc: "Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings/Out of the nest, to spatter...
Akhil Sharma's An Obedient Father, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is an Indian family novel that should appeal to anyone with a taste for red-blooded American realism and farce. His narrator, Ram Karan, a corrupt inspector for the New Delhi school system, is a self-pitying moral sloth whom Mark Twain would have recognized in a Missouri minute...
What these two isolated facts have to do with each other is made resplendently luminous in Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 164 pages; $30), a long narrative poem with a number of stories on its mind. One is what Walcott modestly calls his "inexact and blurred biography" of the painter Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors were driven out of Portugal, who chose to practice his art in Europe rather than the raw island paradise of his birth. A parallel account involves Walcott: his boyhood fascination with the reproductions of European masterpieces he found in books...
Heaney's Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 219 pages; $25) has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well...