Nathan Heller Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Nathan Heller

On this rereading, I was haunted by Tolstoy’s strange, beautiful multi-chapter scene about Konstantin Levin mowing his own field with a scythe: an intimate portrait of the anguish and the miracle of graceful work by a writer who knew both.

Nathan Heller

With the Academy Awards nearing, I wanted to swell the big music for “Oscar Wars,” by my brilliant colleague @MJSchulman, which I’ve been reading to real delight. It’s a blast—fun and vivid—and somehow also a serious history. An amazing thing to pull off.

Nathan Heller

In this summer-reading roundup at the @NewYorker, I recommended the remarkable "Brotherless Night," by V. V. Ganeshananthan. https://t.co/qlf4x4I0A2

Nathan Heller

I felt as if a novel I’d been prowling for among the new releases—crisp but ambitious, funny but empathetic, pluralistically generous and historically smart—had landed in my lap from a hundred-and-forty-year drop... the book is lean and engrossing and bright.

Nathan Heller

Perhaps the purest of Amis’s novels... Amis said that the real subject of every novel was, as Trollope had it, “The Way We Live Now,” and this one, set in a near future of shifty relationships and misinformation, shows how keen his social vision could be.

Nathan Heller

In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, “viral” rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success.

Out of stock

Nathan Heller

I've touted Jorie Graham's "To 2040" to so many people privately I thought I ought to do it publicly. It's the most extraordinary poetry collection I've read in a good while. It brings language into places I've never seen it brought before. It's a breaking-the-sound-barrier book.

Nathan Heller

Ganeshananthan is writing about Sri Lanka, but she is an American novelist. This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.

Nathan Heller

In this summer-reading roundup at the @NewYorker, I recommended the remarkable "Brotherless Night," by V. V. Ganeshananthan. https://t.co/qlf4x4I0A2