A playful look at love, literature and Bluebeard, Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Mr. Fox, is nonetheless a serious piece of fiction. The tone is lighthearted, but beneath the veneer of arch teasing between novelist Mr. Fox, his muse, Mary Foxe, and his unhappy wife, Daphne, lies a nuanced examination of how we manage our expectations 
There are more than a few echoes in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, a chilly and scalpel-sharp remembrance of an extramarital affair and its aftershocks. Enright’s icy prose has been called Didion-esque, and there’s a similarly unflinching quality to her heroine’s self-assessment as in Jardine Libaire’s Here Kitty Kitty. But The Forgotten Waltz is defiantly, 
David Rowell has given himself a large canvas with his new novel, The Train of Small Mercies. Leaping from city to city on the day Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train chugged slowly down the East Coast, Rowell’s cast of characters comprise the whole of an America on the cusp of major changes. The problem is, 
Among the strands that comprise Susan Orlean’s thorough, wide-ranging and ambitious Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend are the promised biography of America’s first dog film star; a history of the evolution of animals into house pets; a shocking revelation that America had a dog army during WWII (where was that fact in 
