“Open Heart,” by Elie Wiesel
When eighty-two-year-old Elie Wiesel was told he needed emergency heart surgery he was surprised rather than afraid.
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Posts by: Malcolm Forbes
Havana Requiem, by Paul Goldstein
Legal eagle Michael Seeley is on his last chance. His Manhattan law firm has warily agreed to take him back but his probation means reining in the waywardness and alcoholism that ruined his marriage and jeopardised his professional standing.
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Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery, by Bill Clegg
There is a moment in Junky in which a psychiatrist asks William Burroughs’ narrator why he needs narcotics. His answer is to get out of bed in the morning, to function – “I need it to stay alive.” Later, managing to stay clean for two months but seeing his new existence as dull, he can’t help but remember the pleasure from his addiction, “your life draining into your arm three times a day.” Heroin was for him a necessary stimulant, a vitalizing giver not sapper of life.
...moreThe New Gilded Class
Christina Alger’s debut The Darlings follows the Darling family headed by a billionaire financier through the financial crisis. Luckily, these rich people are really screwed up.
...morePerceptive and Prophetic
Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight.
...moreFitzgerald’s Lost Road Trip
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-lost account, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, follows Zelda and Scott on an eventful road trip in the 1920s.
...moreToteninsel in English
New in English, Gerhard Meier’s 1979 Isle of the Dead recalls W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as two friends traverse their town, discussing nature and death in elegant prose.