Book of the Month – Princeton Writes

Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
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Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison

admin2025-06-18T11:55:14-04:00

Book of the Month: Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison Critical Assessment “Thanks to this narrative method and Ms. Morrison's magisterial yet sensuous prose, ''Beloved'' possesses the heightened power and resonance of myth - its characters, like those in opera or Greek drama, seem larger than life and their actions, too, tend to strike us as enactments of ancient rituals and passions. To describe ''Beloved'' only in these terms, however, is to diminish its immediacy, for the novel also remains precisely grounded in an American reality -the reality of black history as experienced in the wake of the Civil [...]

Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrisonadmin2025-06-18T11:55:14-04:00

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

admin2025-04-10T16:45:51-04:00

Book of the Month: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013) Critical Evaluation "It is dangerous to write openings as compelling as Donna Tartt's. In The Secret History, the one-page prologue gives us a murder and a narrator who has helped to commit it. The Little Friend starts with the death of a child who, by page 15, is found hanging by a piece of rope from a tree branch, his red hair "the only thing about him that was the right colour any more". And now, in The Goldfinch, Tartt has a 50‑page two-part opening. In the first section, the narrator, Theo Decker, is holed up [...]

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)admin2025-04-10T16:45:51-04:00

Book of the Month: The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys

admin2025-04-10T16:44:02-04:00

The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys Critical Evaluation “By night, I attended classes at University College Cork where, as part of an English-literature module, I first read Jean Rhys’s beautiful and subversive Wide Sargasso Sea. Here were words engaged in a different sort of taking apart. ‘Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th century,’ Michele Roberts has said of Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel didn’t just take inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it illuminated and confronted it, challenged the narrative. The shorthand [...]

Book of the Month: The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhysadmin2025-04-10T16:44:02-04:00

Book of the Month: The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual Of Survival & Manners by J.P. Donleavy (1975)

admin2025-06-04T15:38:30-04:00

Critical Evaluation "Books of advice come in many forms: financial, spiritual, physical, philosophical. Novels too are books of advice, if read in a certain light. Eve Babitz understood, for example, that part of Colette’s greatness is that you can open her novels anywhere and “brush up on what to do.” There are only two advice books I’ve read more than once. One is Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to Be Idle” (2004). Its title is self-explanatory. The other is J.P. Donleavy’s “The Unexpurgated Code” (1975). Its title is less so. Donleavy’s book is a sendup of the form that happens to be, possibly, [...]

Book of the Month: The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual Of Survival & Manners by J.P. Donleavy (1975)admin2025-06-04T15:38:30-04:00

Book of the Month: Foster by Claire Keegan

admin2025-04-10T16:40:59-04:00

Critical Evaluation "We critics are guilty of emphasizing, ad nauseam, the novella’s size. Our epithets (“short,” “slim,” “brief”) imply slightness, something lesser than, as if we owe the reader a trigger warning: not a novel. "But who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend? "For those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, “Foster,” is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year. "The narrator is a young girl in rural Ireland who is sent by her parents to live with the Kinsella family [...]

Book of the Month: Foster by Claire Keeganadmin2025-04-10T16:40:59-04:00

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)

admin2025-04-07T13:54:08-04:00

Book of the Month:The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018) Critical Evaluation "And yet despite her acid critique of writers and their discontents, or perhaps because of her dead-on depiction, Nunez has won over the literary world with 'The Friend.' The novel, an acerbic but often poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art and literature, received this year’s National Book Award for fiction and drew euphoric reviews from critics, who hailed it as a subtle, unassuming masterpiece. (Writing in The Times, Dwight Garner called Nunez 'a crisply philosophical and undervalued novelist.') "The rapturous reception has stunned Nunez, 67, who has been quietly writing [...]

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)admin2025-04-07T13:54:08-04:00

Book of the Month: The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang

admin2024-12-11T14:45:54-05:00

The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang Critical Evaluation "The Vegetarian is a story in three acts: the first shows us Yeong-hye’s decision and her family’s reaction; the second focuses on her brother-in-law, an unsuccessful artist who becomes obsessed with her body; the third on In-hye, the manager of a cosmetics store, trying to find her own way of dealing with the fallout from the family collapse. Across the three parts, we are pressed up against a society’s most inflexible structures – expectations of behaviour, the workings of institutions – and we watch them fail one by one. The novel repeatedly shows [...]

Book of the Month: The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kangadmin2024-12-11T14:45:54-05:00

Book of the Month: We Must Not Think of Ourselves (2023) by Lauren Grodstein

admin2024-06-18T15:50:05-04:00

We Must Not Think of Ourselves (2023) by Lauren Grodstein Critical Evaluation "Two decades before World War II, Lauren Grodstein’s great-grandparents fled Poland’s capital city and the antisemitism that was already ascendant there. “In all likelihood,” she writes in the afterword to this accomplished sixth book, “I would not be here had they stayed.” A chilling what-if, an idea for a book. More than a century after those ancestors escaped to safety, Grodstein gives voice to the doomed denizens they might have become. Set in the brutal Warsaw ghetto that made prisoners of more than 400,000 Jews under Nazi occupation, “We [...]

Book of the Month: We Must Not Think of Ourselves (2023) by Lauren Grodsteinadmin2024-06-18T15:50:05-04:00

Book of the Month: A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki

admin2024-06-18T15:50:53-04:00

A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki Critical Evaluation "Whenever the word "time" comes up —“wasting time,”“about time,” “in time” — the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being.” “Ozeki takes on big themes in “A Tale for the Time Being” — not just the death of individuals but also the death of the planet. In doing so, she ranges widely, drawing in everything from quantum mechanics and the theory of infinite possibilities in an infinite [...]

Book of the Month: A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozekiadmin2024-06-18T15:50:53-04:00

Book of the Month: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (2023)

admin2023-09-25T11:48:48-04:00

Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett Critical Evaluation “Tom Lake” collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in “Our Town.” Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled [...]

Book of the Month: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (2023)admin2023-09-25T11:48:48-04:00

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