The New York Review of Books

A Book for Patients and their Doctors';People come to us for help. They come for health and strength.' With these simple words David Mendel begins Proper Doctoring, a book about what it means (and takes) to be a good doctor, and for that reason very much a book for patients as well as doctorswhich is to say a book for everyone. In crisp,...

Joan Chase's subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of ';joy and ruin' deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household...

The Wooden Shepherdess is the sequel to The Fox in the Attic, and the second volume of Richard Hughes&'s monumental historical fiction, &';The Human Predicament.&' It opens with Hughes&'s hero Augustine in prohibition era America, where he is a bemused onlooker and an increasingly fascinated participant in a country intoxicated with sex, violence,...

Early and Uncollected StoriesA New York Review Books OriginalMavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the...

';It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.' And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother's Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few...

The Widowis the story of two outcasts and their fatal encounter. One is the widow herself, Tati. Still young, she's never had an easy time of it, but she's not the kind to complain. Tati lives with her father-in-law on the family farm, putting up with his sexual attentions, working her fingers to the bone, improving the property and...