Priscilla Gilman

2 weeks ago | washingtonpost.com | Priscilla Gilman

Tom Hanks’s daughter seeks answers about her complicated mother (washingtonpost.com) Tom Hanks’s daughter seeks answers about her complicated mother By Priscilla Gilman 2025040512000000 E.A. Hanks, the daughter of actor Tom Hanks and his first wife, Susan Dillingham, begins her debut book, "The 10," with two epigraphs.

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Priscilla Gilman

“Audition,” the new novel by Katie Kitamura, is a blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace. Kitamura, the author of four previous novels, including 2021’s much-lauded “Intimacies,” writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance. “Audition” is an impossible book to describe in a review because the reading experience depends on disorientation and displacement to achieve its full power.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Priscilla Gilman

Some books win our allegiance almost instantly. Such was the case with Lauren Christensen’s radiant, rigorous, heart-rending debut memoir, “Firstborn,” which engaged me from the opening pages, profoundly moved me, and gave me thoughts too deep for tears. Christensen, a critic and editor at The New York Times Book Review, writes in unfussy prose and with unfettered honesty about the loss of her first child at 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Nov 12, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Priscilla Gilman

My being a great admirer and ardent fan of Haruki Murakami’s has not prevented me from giving several of his recent books, including “Killing Commendatore,” his unwieldy and overstuffed last novel, decidedly mixed reviews. And so it is with unabashed joy that I am here to report: “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” Murakami’s first novel in six years, is also one of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling.

Sep 24, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Priscilla Gilman

A recent list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century that appeared in The New York Times shockingly included not one novel by Louise Erdrich. Speculation was that her many remarkable novels, from Pulitzer finalist “The Plague of Doves” (2009) to National Book Award-winning “The Round House” (2012), National Book Critics Circle Award winner “LaRose” (2016) and Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Night Watchman” (2020) canceled each other out.