Word: novels
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...Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees might have been written with the calculation of getting chosen for Oprah's Book Club. (It wasn't, though it did make Good Morning America's reading list.) The 2002 novel is a coming-of-age story about a white girl, Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning), who flees her abusive father and, in the company of her black nanny Rosaleen, finds refuge and surrogate motherhood with three Afro-angelic sisters who run a bee farm. Why did Kidd, a white woman, choose these heroines? "I grew up surrounded by black women," she told...
...Bees is another entry in the long tradition of books and movies about whites being nurtured and schooled by the example of the black underling. (You've heard of Huckleberry Finn? Gone With the Wind?) The novel is set in rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. But that was back when most...
...first thing is to find a bank I can put it in.' ARAVIND ADIGA, winner of the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger, on what he'll do with the $87,000 in prize money...
Early in to Siberia, a new novel by Per Petterson (Graywolf Press; 245 pages), the narrator and her older brother cut their hands and mix their blood. It's a familiar childhood ritual, sweetened by naive redundancy: How much closer than siblings can you be? The bond between this sister and brother turns out to be a love story--pure, but as painful as the touch of steel to skin...
Petterson, a Norwegian writer, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award last year for his novel Out Stealing Horses, as well as an even more elusive prize for a work in translation: critical acclaim in the U.S. The novel's success was all the more surprising given the quiet nature of Petterson's storytelling. His characters live mostly inside their heads; outside, they can be found in small villages in Scandinavia, drinking, chopping wood, fighting, reading, remembering. It's hardly the stuff of flashy, cosmopolitan fiction-without-borders...