“The Ruin of All Witches,” by Malcolm Gaskill, is a riveting history of life in a 17th-century New England frontier town, where the stress of isolation, foul weather, disease and death led inexorably to accusations of witchcraft.
The Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel, “Is Mother Dead,” features a middle-aged painter desperate to reconcile with the parent from whom she has long been estranged.
Author, humorist and tractor buff, he quit academia and found fame as a correspondent from the Nebraska heartland for the CBS News program “Sunday Morning.”
“What about ‘O Pioneers!’ or ‘My Ántonia’?” asks the documentarian and author of the forthcoming photo book “Our America.” “For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word ‘American.’”
In “Seduced by Story,” the literary critic Peter Brooks argues that a “mindless valorization of storytelling” has crept into every aspect of public discourse, from politics to cookie packages, with alarming results.
