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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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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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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Rachel Khong's first novel is a heartwarming account of family devotion and dementia — which sounds sickly, but her offbeat sensibility and flair for wordplay keep the story from becoming saccharine.
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Jenny Allen's new essay collection is sarcastic, funny and astute, finding humor in everything from her battle with cancer to the indignities of aging to her many, many linguistic pet peeves.
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When New Yorker writer and native North Carolinian Lauren Collins married a French man, she set herself to the task of learning French. Her new memoir is a meditation on language and identity.
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Jonathan Safran Foer returns with a door-stopper of a meditation on family, identity and Judaism. It's the story of a crumbling marriage set against the backdrop of a crisis in Israel.
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Leslie Jamison's new book of essays, The Empathy Exams, combines the intellectual and the emotional to explore the humanizing effect of empathy. Heller McAlpin calls it a "soaring performance."
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In her new book of essays, I See You Made an Effort, comedian Annabelle Gurwitch muses on middle-aged life. Critic Heller McAlpin says that the book, infused throughout with "sharp wit," is hilarious.
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Nicholson Baker's latest novel, Traveling Sprinkler, revolves around Paul Chowder, a lonely poet who's fascinated by drone warfare and Debussy. Chowder was the star of Baker's 2009 novel The Anthologist, and reviewer Heller McAlpin welcomes his reappearance — though not his political rants.
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What do you do when your 19-year-old son becomes a father? You roll with the punches. Anne Lamott's new book, Some Assembly Required, is a witty and refreshingly honest record of the joys and stresses of becoming a first-time grandmother.