Alexandra Fuller is the award-winning author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. The book, a memoir of her childhood in Africa, is now a best-selling paperback.
To the Wedding by John Berger (Vintage, $12). I am often awestruck by the languid, easy way in which Berger tells a story, with such poetic force, such courage, such compassion. To the Wedding follows a great pilgrimage of late-20th-century characters who are tugging their histories behind them like millstones. Yet it is also a timeless story of unconditional love.
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Echoing Silences by Alexander Kanengoni (Heinemann, $12). Kanengoni was a liberation fighter in Rhodesia, and this stark autobiographical novel about his war experiences punched me right in the stomach the first time I read it.
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, $13). Naipaul is a fearful snob, which is a pity, because he has an otherwise wonderful mind. The tenuousness of life in a post-colonial world is an issue of power, not race, and Naipaul dispels the race myth with such an accurate blow to the head that I think he kills it dead forever.
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (Penguin, $14). Until recently, memoirs were either too scandalous to stomach or they glossed over the knotty issues that make families interesting. In this 1996 account of her East Texas upbringing, Karr writes unflinchingly about the sort of lives usually sanitized as fiction, and she does so without making us feel as if we have accidentally walked into someone’s therapy session.
The Meadow
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Taking aim at Venezuela’s autocratFeature The Trump administration is ramping up military pressure on Nicolás Maduro. Is he a threat to the U.S.?
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Comey indictment: Is the justice system broken?Feature U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan has indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of lying and obstructing Congress
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Government shuts down amid partisan deadlockFeature As Democrats and Republicans clash over health care and spending, the shutdown leaves 750,000 federal workers in limbo
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Lou Berney’s 6 favorite books with powerful storytellingFeature The award-winning author recommends works by Dorothy B. Hughes, James McBride, and more
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Elizabeth Gilbert’s favorite books about women overcoming difficultiesFeature The author recommends works by Tove Jansson, Lauren Groff, and more
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Fannie Flagg’s 6 favorite books that sparked her imaginationFeature The author recommends works by Johanna Spyri, John Steinbeck, and more
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Jessica Francis Kane's 6 favorite books that prove less is moreFeature The author recommends works by Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie-Helene Bertino, and more
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Keith McNally's 6 favorite books that have ambitious charactersFeature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
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Garrett Graff's 6 favorite books that shine new light on World War IIFeature The author recommends works by James D. Hornfischer, Craig L. Symonds, and more
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Helen Schulman's 6 favorite collections of short storiesFeature The award-winning author recommends works by Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, and more
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Beatriz Williams' 6 timeless books about history and human relationshipsFeature The best-selling author recommends works by Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, and more
