Joanna Moorhead Virago Press ($25) by Laura Winton What would you do if you found out that a member of your family was one of the most famous expatriate artists in Mexico? If you are Joanna Moorhead, you hop on a plane across the ocean to meet your long-lost cousin, Leonora Carrington-and in the process, […]

Ernest J. Gaines Vintage ($15) by Micah Winters Ernest J. Gaines's newest novella, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, opens with a gunshot, and spends the majority of its remainder working back to that very gunshot through the life of the man who fired it. Gaines sets this tale, as is his custom, in the southern […]

Edited by Amit Majmudar Alfred A. Knopf ($12.95) by John Bradley "I must confess to having disliked political poetry and 'protest' poetry for much of my reading life," confesses editor Amit Majmudar in his candid introduction to this collection. It was not until 9/11, Majmudar explains, that he woke from his apolitical "stupor." His anthology […]

INTERVIEWS: Interviewed by Ben Shields Beneath the Radar: An Interview with Janet Capron This proud Park Avenue schoolgirl-turned-floozy has chronicled her bourgeois class suicide in an outrageous debut novel-one that never lets the burden of actual facts get in the way of what things were really like in 1970s New York. Habit of Mind: An […]