Jason Sheehan

"The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines — mother kills four children, savings at risk of ...

I ... don't know what to say about this.

Ten minutes ago, I finished Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar, Volume Two: Into The Forest and my brain isn't quite right yet. Not quite entirely back in my skull from wherever it is brains go when they get into the serious ...

At a table at a skuzzy pub just up the street from the haunted house, a journalist sits, listening to her source ramble on and on about mysterious disappearances, ancient secrets, strange conspiracies and immortality.

She's being good. Has promised that she will listen, and she's trying her best. But ...

This is the funniest book about investment banking and the European financial crisis you'll read all year. Probably.

I mean, who knows? It's possible that the field of banking fiction is just full of laughs, but I doubt that anyone out there has captured the absurdity of it, the gallows ...

In every book, you have to find a character that you love. This is true for authors as well as readers — we both need something to hang onto when the going gets rough, someone to root for, someone in whom we find small fragments of ourselves.

This is doubly ...

There's magic in the West, and weirdness not easily explained. The deserts are a place of ghostly silences and inexplicable sounds in the night. The mountains have a pull that is magnetic — the kind of thing you can feel in your sleep. The wind will mess with your dreams.

It begins with a solitary Russian underground in Leningrad in 1937, in a train tunnel not yet completed — an artist censoring photographs for the state, removing the images of traitors from the official history of a place already expert at removing people.

It ends with a solitary Russian in ...

No one's going to read Leigh Bardugo's newest book, Six Of Crows, without thinking about Ocean's 11. No one's going to hear the premise — six young criminals hired to break into (and then out of) the most secure prison in the world — without thinking of Danny Ocean and ...

Good morning, here are our early stories:

-- Afghan Force Says It Has Retaken Kunduz From Taliban.

-- Joaquin Lashes Bahamas, Could Have Eastern U.S. In Crosshairs.

-- Syrian Opposition Says Russian Airstrikes Aren't Targeting ISIS.

And here are more early headlines:

A New Blast Shakes Chinese ...

"Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs."

That's Ray, talking to Luz, on the day they first met, explaining the draw of California, the curse of it. What drew down generations of ...

"Oh, yes, you'd return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the Eastern Seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You're unworthy of her [Yes.[No.]] Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making ...

Literary fairy dust, the exclamation point. The cheapest, sleaziest of the punctuation marks, unconscious of any subtleties or nuance. Generally the mark of choice for tweens and the emails of suspiciously chipper HR managers (We're cleaning out the office fridge this Wednesday!), the exclamation point is commonly eschewed by anyone ...

I love the weirdos.

I love the mad ones and the nutjobs. The crazy-pants hucksters with nothing to go on but their words and the paper worlds they construct. I have a lasting respect for those writers who set out to break the language with cause (in support of time ...

There will come a point while reading Did You Ever Have A Family, the debut novel by agent and memoirist Bill Clegg, that you will want to put it down. To leave it aside for shinier, prettier, less complicated things.

You'll be overwhelmed by the number of characters — all ...

No one has ever written about having a body the way Alexandra Kleeman does.

Not about having a girl body or a boy body (though both Kleeman and her Kleeman-esque protagonist, A, are women, so girl bodies are more heavily featured), and not a young body or an old body. ...

To find a beginning can be a complicated thing for an author. Not as tough, usually, as finding an end, but it has its own challenges. The blank page, the first line, the headlong entry into a new world populated by nothing more than your imagination? It's intimidating.

In his ...

I don't want to say a single thing about this book — about Black Chalk, the debut novel from Christopher Yates, who writes like he has 30 books behind him; like he's been doing this so long that lit games and deviltry come to him as natural as breathing.

I ...

No monsters. No killer plagues, vampires or nuclear war. No war of any kind, actually. Really, no unkindness. No hunger. No want. No consequences that can't be undone with a kind smile, a little nap and, of course, the needle.

Jesse Ball's world in A Cure For Suicide is missing ...

Under normal circumstances, I am a dog-earer of books. A book-marker — using receipts and matchbooks and old train tickets to flag pages and red pens to mark passages which moved me or made me want to kick an author in the shins. A mediocre book will have a few ...

Of all the overdone tropes available in the LitFic Plot-O-Matic 9000, the Grown-Children-Return-For-Funeral-of-Parent (With Issues) button has been mashed so often that its light is burned out.

Think about how many times you've seen this setup used. A parent has done something terrible. He or she dies. The parent's adult ...