Out in paperback this week, The Guardians is Sarah Manguso’s elegy for a friend who eloped from a psychiatric ward and jumped in front of a Metro-North train. As her book joins the slim ranks of literature mourning the loss of a platonic friend, we follow the cadences of her grief with four stanzas from Tennyson’s masterwork of that genre, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”
Read MoreHerman Koch’s The Dinner chronicles four adults who come together because of a horrific act their kids have committed. Hints of Memento, a dash of The Silence of the Lambs ... read on for more of the celluloid ingredients Koch used to make his chef-d’oeuvre.
Read MoreIn England, doctors are now prescribing books to patients with mental health issues. And this week, David Shields put out a book called How Literature Saved My Life. Did books really save his life — and could they save yours?
Read MoreMy mind kept jumping around as I made my way through Me and the Devil's brutal sex scenes and curmudgeonly rants — not to mention the long dialogue between the two titular characters, during which the narrator keeps vomiting ghost-rats. By the end, I had scribbled down a handful of ways to approach the book, which I present to you now.
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