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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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. -
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. -
Set during a uniquely stressful summer for one Nantucket family, Gabriella Burnham's second novel highlights the strong bonds between a mom and her daughters. -
In a heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín's handles uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging through time to a devastating climax. -
Talk about a dream, kill a conversation. But not in the case of graphic novelist Roz Chast. Even her subconscious emanations present deliciously skewed takes on life's absurdities and fraught moments. -
The writer W. Somerset Maugham plays a central role Tan Twan Eng's entrancing new novel that encompasses at-the-time risky interracial and homosexual love stories and a scandalous murder trial. -
In her return to short stories, the Interpreter of Maladies author returns to fiction that powerfully conveys her characters' efforts to navigate geography and culture to find a place in the world. -
Lydia Davis' focus has shifted largely from issues of parenting and domestic relationships to aspects of aging — but the results are as penetrating as anything she's written. -
Daniel Mason's gorgeous fifth novel tells of a yellow house deep in the woods of western Massachusetts — and its motley succession of occupants who leave their mark on the property.
