Bookmark These: November 2009

ELLE's November reading recommendations

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Somewhere in the Last Act
Bare-bones brilliant, Philip Roth's novella The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) brings us face-to-face—and groin to groin—with the long acclaimed, lately retired theater actor Simon Axler and all the sexy, sickly, slippery goings-on that make up his shockingly funny (when not funereal) offstage suburban-Connecticut highs, lows, and in-betweens.

Catalytic Characters
Margot Livesey, Jane Smiley, Denis Johnson, ZZ Packer, and Jonathan Safran Foer are among the stellar cast that weighs in on good, bad, and ugly encounters with, and advice from, their influences—mainly other authors—in the new anthology edited by Elizabeth Benedict, Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives (Free Press).

The Little Woman Who Could
Harriet Reisen's Louisa May Alcott (Henry Holt) captures the grit and grace notes of the hardscrabble life and eventual fame of the Little Women author. When not writing books, magazine pieces, journal entries, and letters, Alcott tended Civil War soldiers, traveled, and taught. Her story equals—maybe bests—her beloved book about the lively March sisters.

What do you think?
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