Family, Intolerance And Dealing With Disaster In 'Burgess Boys'

Lizzie Skurnick — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000

How often does the family car really kill one of its regular passengers? It's a recurring trope in literary fiction — the parent's moment of inattention that changes a household's fate forever — but in Elizabeth's Strout's novel The Burgess Boys, her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge, that accident is flipped on its head.

Right On The Money: A 'Capital' Book For Our Times

Lizzie Skurnick — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Lizzie Skurnick writes the "That Should Be a Word" column for the New York Times Magazine.

England has always reveled in its drawing-room dramas, from Jane Austen's social minefields to E.M. Forster's Howards End to Upstairs, Downstairs — and yes, the blockbuster Downton Abbey.

John Lanchester's brilliant Capital, set on a once-ordinary London block whose housing prices have skyrocketed, has the distinction of being the first brick-and-mortar novel set squarely in our current times.