Michael Schaub
Michael Schaub is a writer, book critic and regular contributor to NPR Books. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Portland Mercury and The Austin Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen's new collection looks at how it feels and what it means to be a refugee. It's a wonderful group of stories that prove fiction can do more than tell stories, it can bear witness.
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Paul Auster's new novel is a departure for the author — 880 pages of flowing prose about four versions of one character, living four mostly-parallel lives. It's sometimes confusing, but never boring.
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Kevin Wilson's new novel follows a pregnant teen who joins an experimental commune — but the characters in Perfect Little World never come alive, and the book suffers from an overdose of whimsy.
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The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's new collection are cold, unfiltered, frequently pathetic — all suffering from unease and nameless longing, made understandable by each perfectly-built story.
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Noy Holland's new collection brings together several decades worth of difficult-to-describe stories — some only a few paragraphs long, and all of them hallucinatory and maddening in the best way.
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Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is a contemporary coming-of-age story about a young woman — but it avoids the familiar story arc so common to other novels in that genre.
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Claudia Salazar Jiménez's new novel is short and brutally effective. It's the story of three women from different walks of life, all caught up in the violence that convulsed Peru in the 1980s.
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Rabih Alameddine's new novel begins with Satan and Death arguing, in the mind of a poet on the verge of a breakdown. Satan wants him to remember those lost to AIDS; Death preaches forgetfulness.
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Maria Semple's new novel centers on erratic, overworked mother Eleanor, who makes a promise before the book begins: Today will be different. And it is, but not the way she expected or hoped for.
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Emma Donoghue's latest follows a nurse in 19th century Ireland who agrees to monitor a famed fasting girl. But both the unsympathetic nurse and the credulous villagers are hard to like or understand.