Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collections Stealing The Fire and California Tales. Her reviews, interviews, and cultural reporting have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Daily Beast, the Paris Review, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, Bookforum, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and BBC.com among others. She is a current vice president/online and former president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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Author Hortense Calisher once called the short story "an apocalypse in a teacup." Critic Jane Ciabattari presents her favorite mini-apocalypses of 2012, from veteran authors like Sherman Alexie to newcomer Claire Vaye Watkins, who combines a unique voice and a shadowed family history in her debut collection.
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Amanda Coplin's first novel follows Talmadge, the titular orchardist, who doesn't stray far from his fruit trees — but trouble comes to him in the form of two pregnant teenage runaways. The book, by turns lyrical and gritty, is a glimpse into the massive changes in the American West at the end of the 19th century.
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Dozens of journalists have been killed on the job in the past decade. Joshua Henkin's new novel follows the family of a man killed while reporting from Iraq as it copes with his loss, and the various secrets each family member is keeping from the others.
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T.C. Boyle's new novel, When The Killing's Done, follows prescient environmental quarrels in Santa Barbara between an environmentalist and a biologist — but the bureaucratic bickering pales in comparison to the ferocious powers of nature.
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In her debut novel, Swamplandia!, Karen Russell tells a fantastical story of a gator-theme-park-owning family trying to make ends meet in the lush (and dangerous) Florida swamplands.
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Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts' memoir of essays explores Harlem's current gentrifying transformation in relation to the Harlem Renaissance as chronicled by James Baldwin, Jean Toomer and other literary greats.
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Charles Baxter is a genius of the quotidian. From his earliest stories on, he has shown a gift for illuminating the surreal just below the surface of daily life.
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In his lyrical new novel, Brooklyn's Paul Auster tracks a disaffected young man's wanderings through the outer boroughs, and his struggles with loss, estranged family and the Great Recession.
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In Myla Goldberg's The False Friend, a woman revisits her hometown to atone for a crime that no one remembers. Ten years after Bee Season, Goldberg's compelling new novel examines the nature of childhood trauma, and just how subjective memories can be.
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In Antonya Nelson's provocative novel Bound, the lives of two high school best friends tragically collide after years of estrangement. Nelson's prose captures the clamor of 21st century life, and the ways in which friends obligate, abuse and occasionally rescue each other.