“And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“ You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card— and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 15, 2014)

Americanah is a wonderful epic saga of love, hair, blogs, racism in America, and life in Nigeria. It takes place over a period of about 15 years and is primarily about a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze. The meaning of the word Americanah is a person who returns to Nigeria after spending time abroad.

The main part of the story takes place in a hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey. Ifemelu is on a fellowship at Princeton and the nearest place to get weaves is in Trenton. As she is getting her hair done she goes back in time and the reader gets filled in with her life story.

Ifemelu grew up in poverty in Lagos. She managed to go to university there and won a scholarship to Wellson, a college in Philadelphia. She struggles with money and finds it very difficult to get a job. When she does work, she sends money back home to her parents. Ifemulu’s primary job is as a nanny. She describes the dynamics of her employer’s marriage as “she loves him and he loves himself.” She is introduced to her employer’s cousin Curt and Ifemelu and he have a relationship for quite a while. His being white and rich cause some difficulties for them.

Ifemelu cuts off all contact with Obinze despite the fact that they had planned to be together. She had made a choice to do something that left her shamed and abased and she is unable to tell Obinze about it. So, rather than tell him, she severs their contact. He is distraught and does not know what to do. He continues to write to her for months but there is no answer from Ifemelu.

Meanwhile, Obinze goes to London where he lives underground after his six month visa expires. He is working construction and continues to do this until he is deported back to Nigeria.

Ifemelu remains in the United States for 13 years and has a series of relationships with different men. Of significance besides Curt, who is white, is Blaine who is African American and a professor at Yale. Theirs is a long-term relationship that Ifemelu breaks off in order to return to Lagos.

Ifemelu has started a blog called “Raceteenth: Understanding America for the non-American black.” She writes anonymously about varied topics of racism that she encounters in the United States and the differences between being African American and a non-American black person. Her blog is very successful and brings her status and money as people make financial contributions to keep the blog going. She also does speaking engagements about topics she covers in her blog.

The book has many characters in it, each of whom we come to know and connect with. However, it is primarily about Ifemelu and Obinze, their lives and love. I found the book fascinating and very readable. It does not ever let go of the messages that the author seeks to provide the reader. Racism is a constant theme in the book as is life in America for black Americans and non-American blacks. I found the theme of blogging as a way to share knowledge very intriguing. Actual blogs are a part of the book.

Adiche is a wonderful writer. Her short stories, all of which I’ve read, have knocked me out. I plan on reading her other novels. I can see why this brilliant woman has received a MacArthur Genius Award.   Highly recommended

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 511 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories Purple Hibiscus

Bibliography:

• Purple Hibiscus (2003)
• Half a Yellow Sun (2006)
• The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories (2009)
• Americanah (May 2013) 

There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (FEB 27, 2014)

It is, perhaps, a fortuitous accident that I turned the last pages of Ben Fountain’s absolutely brilliant novel during Memorial Day…a day when rhetoric about courage, support, sacrifice, and patriotism overflows.

Billy Lynn – the eponymous hero of this book – is a genuine American hero. He and his fellow Bravo Squad members decimated an insurgency – caught on film by an embedded Fox News crew — and became overnight sensations in a nation starved for good news about Iraq. They are brought home for a media-intensive “Victory Tour” – in cities that happen to lie in an electoral swing state — to reinvigorate support for the war. We meet them at the end of that tour, on a rainy Thanksgiving, hosted by America’s Team, The Dallas Cowboys.

They are, in more ways than one, anonymous to an American public; their reinvented names are meant to erase their identity (Major Mac, Mango, Lodes, Billy, etc.) In the fabled Texas Stadium, their faces are interspersed on a JumboTron screen with ads for Chevy cars and Cowboy-brand toaster ovens and high-capacity ice-makers.

Surrounded by so-called patriots, Billy and his friends are bombarded with words stripped of meaning: “rerrRist, currj, freedom, nina leven, Bush, values, support.” Billy reflects: “They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.”

The people that surround him are insatiably expecting Billy to impart wisdom in sound bites. Amid a world of plenty, multi-millionaires who have never put themselves in harm’s way let loose a stream of platitudes but Billy “truly envies these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point…” At another point, he reflects, “Never do Americans sound so much like a bunch of drunks as when they are celebrating at the end of their national anthem.”

Nineteen-year-old Billy – still a virgin, with major lust going on for a Cowboys cheerleader who believes that cheerleading is a “spiritual calling” – has the necessary replies to inane questions down pat. He is as real as he can be, as American as he can be.

And in this way, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk –marketed as a satire and blurbed as a new Catch-22 – is anything but. There is nothing surreal about it; in fact, it is an entirely apt portrayal of the times we live in. I thought this book was absolutely brilliant – well-crafted, filled with insight and wisdom, and heart-wrenching. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the quintessential American novel, asking that all-important question: who are we and what do we want to become?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 506 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ben Fountain
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007)
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)

“Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 24, 2011)

E.L. Doctorow’s 1974 masterpiece, Ragtime, takes its name from the a style of music, the melodious offspring of blackface cakewalks and patriotic marches, that perfectly captures the optimism and energy of the America in the early 1900s. It’s aptly titled too, for Doctorow manages to capture the energy of the era, a time of hitherto unheard of growth and prosperity, a time when coal miners took on the capitalists for safer work conditions and fair pay, and won; a time when a single, socially- minded photographer, documenting immigrant ghettos, took pictures powerful enough to move a president and serve as evidence of the necessity of improved housing conditions for the poor; a time when American entrepreneurs amassed more wealth than some European monarchy, through little more than hard work and talent. However, it was also the era of Jim Crow legislation and the venomous prejudice that made it impossible for a black man to materially enjoy his success, say, by driving a shiny new Model T Ford – but more on that later.

Although too many people, unprotected by social safety nets or workplace regulations, lived and worked in squalor, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century brought with it a general sense of hope and optimism, and it’s the paradoxes of this period, the progressive enlightenment and conservative barbarism, the frosty rationality and fuzzy superstition, the fervent patriotism and homicidal anarchy, that E.L. Doctorow builds Ragtime around.

Set in New Rochelle, NY and New York City, the book centers on an upper-class family known only by their roles in relation to a young male observer: Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather. And while they could stand-in for any of a certain type of family – well-off, white, entrepreneurial – they are remarkable, in all their anonymity, for the ways in which they burst out of type, in spite of themselves: Father, a manufacturer of patriotic paraphernalia, tags along with his flags on Arctic expeditions, something of a hobbyist explorer; Mother, radically progressive without knowing it, befriends Sarah, the black mother of the illegitimate baby Mother finds buried in the garden, and ends up raising the black child as her own; Younger Brother builds bombs to aid a series of rebels after his heart is broken by the infamous Evelyn Nesbit, wife of the morphine-addicted sadist and millionaire, Harry Thaw. In what was billed as “The Crime of the Century,” Thaw famously blew off the face of Nesbit’s long-time lover, the architect, Stanford White, in the roof-top garden at Madison Square Gardens.

In fact, throughout the book, the whole family, not just Younger Brother, have connections of varying importance with historical figures: Mother serves Harry Houdini lemonade when his car breaks down in front of their house; a heartbroken Younger Brother takes to following Emma Goldman and her revolutionaries around; Father helps to end a standoff in J. Pierpont Morgan’s house. And while this anonymous family plays its bit role in history, cultural trends bring the major players together: J. Pierpont Morgan tries to interest Henry Ford in joining his secret society founded on Egyptian-flavoured occultism; Harry Houdini impresses a mistaken Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the inventor of a flying machine; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung happen upon Evelyn Nesbit at a street art stall devoted to silhouette art.

However, for all the optimism of the early 20th century, these were far from perfect times: racism was still rampant and institutionalized. Coalhouse Walker is a black musician doomed by his well-groomed confidence and articulate manner and the father of the baby Mother found in the garden. When Mother and Father take Sarah and the baby into their home, Coalhouse drives out from Harlem, every Sunday, his shiny red Model T Ford glinting through the streets of New Rochelle like a flickering flame. This is too much for the men of the Emerald Isle Engine, a volunteer fire brigade, and when Coalhouse fails to show them the deference they feel due, they destroy his car. After Sarah is killed in her misguided attempt to appeal to the federal government for help, Coalhouse’s sets out for revenge, bringing New Rochelle to its knees in terror.

Meticulously researched, this book alludes heavily to historical facts, however, Doctorow’s deft hand keeps the narrative from sagging under the weight of it all, and just as no historical account can ever be free of interpretation, Doctorow’s prose, however deceptively declarative, is steeped in judgment. For example:

“At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.”

As I read Ragtime an American flag billowed in the periphery of my mind’s eye like an animated icon, as if all the threads of the story were woven together to create one of Father’s flags. However, this wonderful exploration of early 20th-century America will appeal not only to history buffs, but to anyone interested in great fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 140 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 8, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	E. L. Doctorow
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia on Ragtime
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  All the Time in the World Homer and Langley The March

Bibliography:

• Welcome to Hard Times (1960)
• Big As Life (1966)
• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Ragtime (1974) 
• Loon Lake (1980)
• World’s Fair (1985)
• Billy Bathgate (1989) / 
• The Waterworks (1994)
• City of God (February 2000)
• Sweet and Stories (May 2004)
• The March (September 2005)
• Homer & Langley (September 2009)
• All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories (March 2011)

Movies from books:

• Ragtime (1981)
• Billy Bathgate

“Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior — to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own antimyth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme — and, at the outset, as implausible — as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to. In the early days of the state the idea appealed to almost everyone except the Arabs. All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once universally so popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 07, 2011)

Long though it is, this quotation sums up just about everything about Roth’s magnificent novel of 1976: its strange title, its grand theme, its somewhat simplistic view of history, and its humor that jumps cheerfully into offensive self-mockery. A long section of the novel takes place in Israel shortly after the Yom Kippur War, when the stereotypes were indeed being turned on their heads, and conversely significant criticism of the state was beginning to be heard from the West. But Roth’s principal subject is not the engaged Jews who assert their selfhood either through Zionism or religion, but the countless secular Jews like himself, living securely in a distant country; how do they establish their identity, especially in mid-life when the question of “Is this really all I am?” typically arises. And of course, being Roth, he handles this quest for the total makeover — the counterlife — also at a much baser level, in terms of the male need for female conquest as the final proof of potency.

I am writing this review also as a follow-up to my recent piece on Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, the most recent Man Booker winner. By coincidence, a friend gave me her copy of the Roth on the same day that I bought the Jacobson; neither of us connected the two. But now, having enjoyed both books immensely, I am amazed at how closely Roth anticipates Jacobson 34 years earlier. Both authors treat the same subjects (male libido and Jewish identity), in the same context (Roth’s book is set partly in England, Jacobson’s entirely so), and with the same sardonic humor (except that Jacobson would spell it “humour”). As far as contemporary events go, the three-and-a-half-decade time gap seems as nothing: Roth alludes to Western condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Yom Kippur War; Jacobson’s characters agonize similarly over Gaza. Both writers invade the no-man’s land between antisemitism and paranoia; Roth is the more neurotic of the two, but he has more bite to his satire, and is to my mind the greater author.

Roth has had two abiding subjects in his oeuvre: Judaism and sex. The Counterlife explores both, though from an oblique perspective, in that his principal characters are neither committed Jews nor always sexually potent. The book opens with Henry Zuckerman, a successful Newark dentist, not yet forty, suffering from impotence caused as the side-effect of his heart medication; sex is what he used to enjoy (with both a mistress and a wife) but can now no longer have. He takes the extreme step of having a risky bypass operation, in order to make a radical change in his life. In the next section, Roth offers a different outcome to Henry’s story, in which he abandons his comfortable American secularism and moves to Israel as a fervent Zionist, living in a militant West Bank settlement and studying Hebrew and Torah. In each of these scenarios, Henry is visited by his elder brother, the successful novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several other Roth novels and is clearly the author’s alter ego. Roth (or Nathan) has several other variants in store, but each involves an attempt at radical life change, moving into the heart of an issue from its fringes — the Counterlife of the title.

Writing through an alter ego who is one of the characters in the book enables the author to play narrative tricks that used to be called Pirandellian but are now labeled post-modern. One, as I mentioned, is the ability to change the story at will. The five sections of the book — labeled respectively Basel, Judea, Aloft, Gloucestershire, and Christendom, although these are not in every case their settings — contradict one another in several significant ways, as though emphasizing the author’s ability to manipulate a story at will. The Gloucestershire section (a skeleton key to the whole) even changes tack three times in eighty pages; it begins with the author describing his own funeral and ends with a preview of the final Christendom section, discussed by two of the characters who are to appear in it! While more literal readers may find this confusing, I found it remarkably easy to buy into the parameters of each section, as the only realities at the time. These switches not only added intellectual excitement, they also deepened the perspective and the seriousness of the issues being addressed, albeit in Roth’s characteristically flippant voice.

While Judaism and sex continue to battle for the spotlight, the sexual aspects will in the end be secondary. The answer to the question “Is this really all I am?” may be sought in adultery or divorce, but conversely by the former playboy settling down and starting a family; both are found in this novel. What makes the book so much more than soap opera is that Roth also poses the who-am-I question as a matter of ethnic and religious identity: What does it mean to be a secular Jew in a largely assimilated society? Is it the role of Israel to serve as what he calls the American-Jewish Australia, taking misfits attempting to find themselves as a people? His Judea section is brilliant in its portrayal of many different views of that extraordinary society, many of them extreme, few of them compatible, but all in essence true. He has one striking passage (a single sentence) describing a Sabbath meal in the settlement that, though probably intended with slight condescension, also brings a light to Zuckerman’s eyes: “Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation — a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.”

But Ronit is a minor character; all the principal women in the novel are Gentile. Roth’s men need non-Jewish wives for camouflage and, as it becomes clear, as opposites against whom to define themselves. Nathan returns from Israel to the suave dining-rooms of Mayfair and meadows of Gloucestershire. In turning these also into ethnic battlegrounds, he exaggerates hugely (though with a germ of truth). Yet he speaks strongly to the need of so many of us, Gentile as well as Jewish, to validate ourselves in opposition to the world around us, rather than settling for the quiet beauty of the ordinary.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (August 6, 1996)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Philip Roth Society Wikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS:	The New York Times review of The Counterlife (1987)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nemesis The Plot Against America Indignation Exit Ghost Everyman

Bibliography:

• Goodbye, Columbus: Novella and five stories (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• Deception (1986)
• The Conversion of the Jews (1993)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)**
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The Plot Against America (September 2004) **
• Everyman (April 2006)
• Indignation (September 2008)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

• The Ghostwriter (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Ogry (1985)
• The Counterlife (1985)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (October 2007)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

David Kapesh Novels:

• The Breast (1973)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Reading Myself and Others (1975)
• The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1990)
• Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for Goodbye, Columbus (2002)
• Study Guide for The Conversion of the Jews (2003)

Movies from books:

• Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (VHS only) (1972)
• The Human Stain (July 2004)

“I want interviews, features, you name it,” Bosco went on. “Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation. That is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 03, 2010)

In Jennifer’s Egan’s lively and inventive novel – A Visit From The Goon Squad – each of its characters feels his or her mortality. Each is a in a tenuous danse-a-deux with “the goon.”

Every chapter is told from a different character’s point of view and it is no accident that the novel starts with Sasha – the assistant of music producer Bennie Salazar, one of the key focal points. Sasha has sticky fingers and is constantly pirating away meaningless objects to compose “the warped core of her life.” These objects serve as talismans, placing her at arm’s length from the love she wants.

And Bennie? A one-time band member and arrogant indie genius, he is now one step removed from the action, adding flakes of gold to his coffee to enhance his libido and bemoaning the state of digital technology. Like Sasha, he’s at arm’s length from a direct connection with love and life in general.

Bennie and Sasha will never know much about each other – even though they’ve worked together for decades – but the reader comes to know them through various stories. We get to know Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, misbehaving, skirt-chasing mentor during a harrowing African safari; Dolly, the PR mogul who places her own daughter in harm’s way; Jules, the ex-con journalist whose lunch with a Hollywood grade B actress goes terribly wrong; Ted Hollander, Sasha’s art-loving uncle, who travels to Naples to find her. Each will add a little something to the puzzle.

Yet none of their stories is told in chronological order, or even through flashbacks. Rather, time is revealed like the grooves of a record album, jumping from track to track in what appears to be no particular order. As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and to hold off the approaching goon. At one point, Dolly reflects, “Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’s overlooked a seismic shift…Now and then (she) finds herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk Magazine. She had no idea.”

The rich, lush, adventurous life that these characters once lived is being replaced by PowerPoints (one young character reveals her story through a 40-page PowerPoint presentation), paid “parrots” who create social media buzz, truncated emails, and digital technology. As Egan’s characters “strut and fret” their last hours on the broader stage, the world of technology is making them increasingly irrelevant. When Alex – Sasha’s would be beau whom we meet in the first chapter – tells Bennie, “I don’t know what happened to me,” Bennie’s answer is, “You grew up, Alex…just like the rest of us.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 257 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Egan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another genre bending new school novel: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Emerald City and Other Stories (1996)
• The Invisible Circus (1997)
• Look At Me (2001)
• The Keep (2007)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (June 2010) /

Movies from Books:

• The Invisible Circle (2001)