PW Best Books 2011: The Call by Yannick Murphy

Twenty years ago, a friend handed me a collection of short stories called Stories in Another Language by Yannick Murphy. Her voice was spare and taut, and her themes were largely family and death, as I recall. It was a slim book, but the stories resonated beyond the pages.

The Call (Harper Perennial), Yannick Murphy’s newest novel, is also slim, spare, uniquely structured—and absolutely beautiful.

Salvage The Bones Takes Top Fiction Honors At The National Book Awards

In a celebratory National Book Awards on Wall Street last night, Stephen Greenblatt took the nonfiction award for Swerve, while, in a surprise turn in fiction, Jesmyn Ward won for Salvage the Bones.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Christ Stopped at Eboli cover
By: Carlo Levi
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 296 pp., $14.00
January 2006
Introduction by MARK ROTELLA

In a Surreal State

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
October 24, 2004

DREAM STATE: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife
By Diane Roberts
Free Press, $25, 368pp

Amore, with knife and fork

Chicago Sun-Times
August 29, 2004

The Food of Love
By Anthony Capella
Viking, $21.95

Eat Your Heart Out

The Washington Post
July 18, 2004

The Food of Love
By Anthony Capella
Viking, $21.95

Miss Understood

Village Voice (New York, NY)
May 9, 2000

Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World
By Sarah Vowell
Simon & Schuster, $23

Crews-ing

Village Voice (New York, NY)
January 11, 2000

Getting Naked with Harry Crews
Edited by Eric Bledsoe
University Press of Florida, 365 pp., $24.95

Sinatraland

Village Voice (New York, NY)
March 16, 1999

Sinatraland
By Sam Kashner
Overlook Press, 192 pp., $22.95