Rebecca Donner

  • culture May 24, 2016

    Hystopia by David Means

    In 1939, wondering how Russia would react to the expanding war, Winston Churchill memorably stated: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. This is an apt description of Hystopia, David Means’s long-awaited novel about Vietnam. Means focuses not on the war but its irresolvable aftermath—specifically, on the psychic damage visited on veterans years after the fall of Saigon. The opening pages introduce us to a twenty-two-year-old vet who commits suicide, the concluding pages present a series of suicide notes, and the pages that come between attempt to answer a grave and persistent

  • interviews November 14, 2013

    Bookforum talks with John Freeman

    "When you're conducting an interview with a writer, you're thinking all these things while the writer is talking, but you have to keep your thoughts at bay long enough so you can hear the germ of what the writer is saying and ask another question."

    When I meet with John Freeman to discuss his new book, How to Read a Novelist, he is in the middle of moving. The wood-planked floors groan under the weight of books, thousands of them stowed in boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling. He offers coffee—the coffee maker isn't packed yet—and I see at once that he's the sort of bibliophile whose immersion in the world of fictional people hasn't hampered his ability to communicate with real, breathing ones. The coffee is good and strong; I haven't had a cup in almost two years, an experiment in caffeine deprivation that has somehow become habitual.

  • interviews March 25, 2013

    Bookforum talks to Rebecca Miller

    I met with Rebecca Miller on a recent chilly afternoon in New York to talk about her ambitious new novel, Jacob's Folly (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), Her previous books include a story collection, Personal Velocity, and a novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; she also wrote and directed the films based on these books, While it may be for her films that she is best known (she is also the writer and director of "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" and "Angela"), Rebecca Miller is a novelist in her own right.

    I met with Rebecca Miller on a recent chilly afternoon in New York to talk about her ambitious new novel, Jacob's Folly (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Her previous books include a story collection, Personal Velocity, and a novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; she also wrote and directed the films based on these books. While it may be for her films that she is best known (she is also the writer and director of "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" and "Angela"), Rebecca Miller is a novelist in her own right. We took refuge in the warmth of a West Village bistro, and over a long lunch discussed sources

  • culture June 23, 2009

    A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

    Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy’s method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. “I was afraid I would break

  • fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal

    Daphne Beal’s first book might be considered an exemplar of what Edmund White recently characterized as the “Peace Corps novel,” in which a “young, privileged American” travels to another country and is transformed by the experience. “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been—bolder, wiser, happier,” insists the narrator of In the Land of No Right Angles, recounting her peregrinations through Nepal and India. To Beal’s credit, she resists facile resolution; cultural dislocation may be transformative, but she also notes the gaps and incongruities.

    The protagonist Beal dispatches abroad

  • fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2007

    That a chemist figures prominently in Andrea Barrett’s new novel, The Air We Breathe, will come as no surprise to those familiar with her fiction. Over the past decade, Barrett has produced a novel and two story collections that dramatize an abiding fascination with scientists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury milieus. Her characters, both historical and imaginary, have included botanists, geneticists, zoologists, biologists, and ornithologists. A genealogical chart is appended to Barrett’s latest offering, illustrating the latticework of relationships that unites major and peripheral