E. L. Doctorow, one of the towering American novelists of the last 50 years, will visit the Writers Institute next week, to present his new novel, Andrew's Brain (2014), about the human mind and its puzzlements.More about the visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html
Terrence Rafferty reviewed the novel on the front page of the New York Times Book Review:
"The sense of being trapped in your own consciousness is, of course, an occupational hazard for writers, but it’s not a problem you’d expect Doctorow to worry himself much about. His fiction has always seemed driven by intense curiosity about the world outside him, about the people of other times and how they lived. So it’s odd that in the past few years he has seemed so interested in characters like the Collyers and Andrew, who prefer to look inward and shun the wider view. They’re exotic specimens, baffled and lonely and pacing in their cages. It’s touching that Doctorow should want to study them, and although they’re essentially comic figures, he’s strangely solicitous of them; he respects the narrow space they find themselves living in."
More in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow.html
