I’ve been waiting a long time for “The Italian Lover,” and, believe me, it’s about time Robert Hellenga got around to writing it.
It has been 12 years since the novel “The Sixteen Pleasures” kept me up on a two-day reading binge as I obsessed over the story of American abroad Margot Harrington and [...]

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British author Zadie Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her third novel On Beauty, a comic homage to E M Forster’s Howard’s End exploring race, class and arrogance at a US university.
Smith wept as she accepted the 30,000 pound ($75,000) prize, the most prestigious award yet for a writer who has [...]

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“The Perfect Man”
by Naeem Murr
Random House, 451 pp., $13.95
The freedom of unsupervised childhood jostles with the claustrophobia of small-town life in Naeem Murr’s brilliant third novel, “The Perfect Man.” The British-born Murr, who has lived his adult life in the U.S., brings to life a large cast of characters and a country tableau across which [...]

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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in a list of the best Latino books of the year, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Daz, got the most votes.
But Viva’s second annual favorites-of-the-year survey also proves that there is much more out there to discover in the Latino literary scene in and [...]

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British author Zadie Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her third novel On Beauty, a comic homage to E M Forster’s Howard’s End exploring race, class and arrogance at a US university.
Smith wept as she accepted the 30,000 pound ($75,000) prize, the most prestigious award yet for a writer who has [...]

Continue reading...