Fiction
BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT （Book Review）
By Maile Meloy
In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an EastCoast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawedcharacters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray thoseclosest to them.
今年是短篇小说的丰产年，但Meloy的叙述简明但细致，不管其背景是蒙大拿，东海岸一所寄宿学校，还是70年代的核电站，以不动声色的克制和冷静的精确发出呼喊。小说中有缺点的人物——恋爱中的农场工人、父亲和女儿，很少从自己的利益出发行动，经常背叛他们最亲密的人。
CHRONIC CITY ( PDF+EXE格式下载 )（Book Review）
By Jonathan Lethem
Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructiveescaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition ofThe New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objectscalled chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.
Lethem的第八部小说在一个另一种现实的曼哈顿展开。拥挤的画面中有一头逃出来的肆意嬉闹、搞破坏的老虎（还是一台地铁开凿机？）在街上窜来窜去，一层笼罩着华尔街的灰蒙蒙的雾，没有战争报道的纽约时报，一个在即将完蛋的国际空间站上进退两难的人，一种叫做查尔特隆的珍奇花瓶，巨大的三明治和效力强劲的大麻。
A GATE AT THE STAIRS （Book Review）（PDF格式下载）
By Lorrie Moore
Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student whohungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt amixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of herown family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.
Moore引人入胜的小说，她十多年来的第一部，发生在2001年，讲述者是一个威斯康辛的大学生，她渴望现实经历，找到了一份工作，帮一对想收养一个混血儿童的波西米亚式夫妇看孩子。同时，她爱上了一个神秘的同学，感到她的家人的迫切要求，尤其是她那在911之后参军的冷酷无情的弟弟。
HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel （Book Review）（PDF格式下载）
By Jeannette Walls
In her luminous memoir, “The Glass Castle,” Walls told of being raised by eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a novel basedon family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith — mustang breaker, schoolteacher,ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The result reanimates a chapter of America’s frontierpast.
在她明白易懂的回忆录《玻璃城堡》中，walls讲述了被古怪、不称职的父母养大的故事。现在，在一部以家族传说为基础的小说中，她采用了她外祖母的口吻，驯马师、老师、农场女主人、酿私酒者、扑克玩家、骑手和在无人区飞行的飞行员。这部作品赋予了美国的拓荒史新的生命。
A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN （Book Review）
By Kate Walbert
The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and ahandful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations andthe impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert’s prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways wesilence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning.
女性简史
这部精巧的小说精炼、集中的十五章交替讲述了英国妇女参政论者和她的多位盎格鲁-美国后裔的生活。主题是女权主义，但Walbert对男性的关切及其在女性生活中留下的印象。Walbert冷酷、睿智的语言捕捉到了我们如何沉默不语和被迫保持沉默，我们努力抓住意义时如何观看和聆听。
Nonfiction
THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science（BookReview）（PDF下载）
By Richard Holmes
Holmes harnesses the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention in this superb intellectual history, whichrecreates a glorious period, some 200 years ago, when figures like William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Joseph Banksbrought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work,” and literary giants like Coleridge and Keatsresponded giddily to these breakthroughs, finding in them an empirical basis for their own faith in human betterment.
《奇迹年代：浪漫主义一代是怎样发现了科学的美与恐怖》
在这部杰出的知识史中，Holmes带着对科学的好奇和诗意的创造力，重建了一段辉煌的时期，大约200年前，William Herschel,Humphry Davy and Joseph Banks等人为科学工作带来了强烈的想象和激动人心，Coleridge和Keats等文学巨人对这些突破做出了晕眩的反应，在其中为他们对改进人类的信念找到了经验基础。
THE GOOD SOLDIERS（Book Review）
By David Finkel
Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor at The Washington Post, gives full voice to his subjects, infantry soldiersfrom Fort Riley, Kan. (average age 19), posted in the lethal reaches of Baghdad at the height of the “surge.” Finkel’s ownperspective emerges through spare descriptions — of a roadside bombing or the tortured memories of a single soldier —that capture the harrowing realities of war.
好兵
普利策奖获得者和华盛顿邮报编辑Finkel完全让他的对象来说话，一位来自堪萨斯的19岁的士兵，驻扎在巴格达附近。 Finkel本人的视角贯穿在节制的描述中——路边炸弹或一位单兵痛苦的记忆，捕捉到了战争令人伤心的现实。
LIT: A Memoir（Book Review）（PDF下载）
By Mary Karr
This sequel to “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry” is also a master class on the art of the memoir. Mordantly funny, free of bothself-pity and sentimentality, Karr describes her attempts to untether herself from her troubled family in rural Texas, herdevelopment as a poet and writer, and her struggles to navigate marriage and young motherhood even as she descendsinto alcoholism.
这部《说谎者俱乐部》和Cherry的续集也是回忆录的大师级作品。刻薄有趣，既不自怜也不伤感，Karr描写了她摆脱她烦人的家人的努力，她成为诗人和作家的过程，她开始酗酒后改善婚姻和做一个年轻妈妈的努力。
LORDS OF FINANCE: The Bankers Who Broke the World（Book Review）
By Liaquat Ahamed
The parallels with our own moment are impossible to miss in Ahamed’s narrative about four members of “the mostexclusive club in the world,” central bankers who dominated global finance in the post-World War I era. Ahamed, a longtimeinvestment manager, evokes in glittering detail a volatile time of financial bubbles followed by busts, all of it guided by playerswedded to economic orthodoxy.
金融之王:搞垮了世界的银行家们
不可能看不出Ahamed讲述的故事跟我们所处时代的类似：四位世界上最排外的俱乐部的成员，在一战后控制全球金融的中央银行家。Ahamed有着漫长的投资管理经验，以吸引人的细节唤起了一个危机之后金融泡沫的风云变幻的时代，一切都受到了固守经济学教条的人物的引导。
RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer’s Life (Book Review)
By Carol Sklenicka
Ten years in the making, this prodigiously researched and meticulous biography sympathetically and adroitly integrates itssubject’s work with the turbulent life — marred by alcoholism, financial turmoil and family discord — that brought it intobeing. Sklenicka shrewdly deconstructs Carver’s fraught relationship with Gordon Lish, the editor who played an outsize rolein the creation of Carver’s stories, the most influential of a generation.
雷蒙德·卡佛：一位作家的一生
这部传记耗时十年，作者做了大量的研究工作，写得一丝不苟，怀着同情，熟练地整合了传主的作品和动荡的生活——饱受酗酒、金融波动和家庭失和之苦。 Sklenicka shrewdly 敏锐地剖析了卡佛跟他的编辑Gordon Lish之间充满不愉快的关系，Lish在卡佛的小说创作中起了非常寻常的作 用。
