Heller McAlpin
Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
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Jacqueline Woodson's exquisitely wrought new novel follows two black families of different classes whose lives become intertwined when their only children conceive a child together in their teens.
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R.L. Maizes' new story collection is a quirky mix of humor, gravity and warmth. She's drawn to outsiders who yearn for connection and who display behaviors and feelings they're not proud of.
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Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story, about a young Vietnamese American writer whose fractured family was torn by their experiences during the Vietnam War.
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For decades, Quindlen has been channeling Baby Boomers' concerns, from motherhood and life-work balance to aging and downsizing. Her new book comes with a stern warning: Grandparents, know thy place.
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Ian McEwan imagines an alternate, technologically-advanced 1982 England in his new novel, in which the development of lifelike, artificially intelligent cyborgs leads to some uncomfortable questions.
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Amid disquisitions on the importance of thank-you notes and a hilariously graphic description of a mammogram, Ellis occasionally ventures into more weighty territory in her first work of nonfiction.
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Nell Freudenberger's new novel is a bittersweet love story — about a lost friend, a missed romance, and an all-consuming career — that uses dense scientific concepts to illuminate everyday emotions.
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Elizabeth McCracken's new novel — a multigenerational saga centered around a Massachusetts bowling alley and its crew of misfits — will grab you from the very first line.
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Degas's sculpture "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" is known the world over. But who is that young lady he depicts? Camille Laurens aims to find out — and realizes something about herself in the process.
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Marina Benjamin's book is more impressionistic and personal than scientific: Don't look here for an explanation of the chemistry or biology of nocturnal wakefulness.