BATTLE - SHOCKED

It’s no surprise Dennis McFarland chose the Battle of the Wilderness as the contextual scaffolding for his searing, poetic and often masterly new Civil War novel, “Nostalgia.” The intense three-day campaign, fought in Northern Virginia in May 1864, was the first showdown between the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and the casualties on both sides were staggering. It marked the beginning of Grant’s Overland Campaign, a strategy that eventually led to the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond and the defeat of the Confederacy. Yet details of the battle remain as shrouded as the thick forests in which it occurred…

Mama’s Boy: A review of David Guterson’s Ed King

The concept novel, like its musical equivalent, has always been a risky endeavor. At its ingenious best—Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” say, or more recently, David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”—the result has moved the needle of serious fiction forward, proving, as it nowadays must always be proved, that the novel is a still-evolving form. For a certain type of author this is rarefied and intoxicating air, a culmination of years of experimentation with voice and structure. That the atmosphere so far up is also cluttered with spectacular misfires and out-of-print debris only makes the challenge that much greater—or foolhardy...

Living With Music: A Playlist by David Goodwillie

David Goodwillie is the author of the forthcoming novel “American Subversive,” and the memoir “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

I did something weird while I wrote “American Subversive”: I went out of my way to listen to music with incisive lyrics. When I mention this to my book-writing friends they look at me sideways, and I don’t blame them. Waltzing with one set of words is hard enough; a concomitant two-step is a recipe for madness. But the music brought me closer to my two main characters — Paige Roderick, a young idealist who turns to radicalism after her brother’s death in Iraq, and Aidan Cole, a cynical New York journalist turned gossip blogger who stumbles upon Paige’s underground world…