Ron Charles

‘The Revisioners’ reminds us of slavery’s long reach, through the generations

December 17, 2019 at 8:10 p.m.

"We have a ghost in here." That's how Toni Morrison writes in "Beloved" about the spiteful specter that haunts an old house in Cincinnati. Her artful invocation of that ghost...

From the censorship of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to the reckless abandon "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Fleishman Is in Trouble," American attitudes to sex in novels has changed dramatically.

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was banned 90 years ago. Now we’re — yawn — bored by obscenity.

December 17, 2019 at 7:36 p.m.

Last month at a book club meeting in a tony Washington suburb, the subject was "Fleishman Is in Trouble," by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. It's a novel about the dissolution of a...

"The Story of a Goat" by Perumal Murugan -- an author who nearly ended his writing career after Hindu fundamentalists attacked his book "One Part Woman" -- jumps nimbly from fantasy to realism to parable.

Perumal Murugan said his career as a novelist was dead. Lucky for us, he was wrong.

November 26, 2019 at 9:06 p.m.

Say what you will about goats, but they rarely take offense. For Indian writer Perumal Murugan, that's a welcome change. Five years ago, Murugan endured such violent protests against one...

Best-selling author Michael Crichton (shown here in 1977) died more than a decade ago, but his work continues to inspire sequels; the latest is "The Andromeda Evolution" by Daniel H. Wilson.

Michael Crichton’s classic thriller ‘The Andromeda Strain’ gets a deadly sequel

November 13, 2019 at 7:18 p.m.

Grab the Purell. Fifty years after Michael Crichton published "The Andromeda Strain," that deadly microbe has mutated again. Prepare yourself for the extinction of mankind in "The Andromeda Evolution." Yes,...

In ‘Nothing to See Here,’ Kevin Wilson sets the family novel ablaze

November 7, 2019 at 6:15 p.m.

Children are weird. Of course, they're also curious, sweet, creative and lots of other delightful things, but it's their uncanniness that makes them so hard to get right in novels....

Bernardine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other' split the Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's "The Testaments," but Evaristo's book was most deserving.

Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ received half a Booker Prize, but it deserves all the glory

November 5, 2019 at 8:00 a.m.

If the best thing a literary prize can do is spark lively discussion, this year's Booker Prize was a stupendous success. Two weeks ago, the judges of England's most prestigious...

In ‘Frankissstein,’ Jeanette Winterson brings something zany and intellectual ALIVE!

October 17, 2019 at 6:32 p.m.

More than 200 years have passed since that brilliant teenager Mary Shelley first galvanized her monster into life. And since then, parts of "Frankenstein" have been dug up and stitched...

Salman Rushdie’s ‘Quichotte’ is a shambling ‘Don Quixote’ for our deceptive era

September 5, 2019 at 4:02 p.m.

In Cervantes' classic novel, a student tells the knight-errant Don Quixote, "The greater the fame of the writer, the more closely his books are scrutinized." Such is the mixed blessing...

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