Lea Carpenter
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Articles by Lea Carpenter
Why "The Odyssey" is Still Relevant (It's Only Partly Thanks to Christopher Nolan)
“There is a stranger outside your house,” writes Emily Wilson in a note introducing her 2017 translation of The Odyssey. “He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait, let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire.
Book Review: ‘The Feeling of Iron,’ by Giaime Alonge Original
You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. A Stunning Novel Follows Nazi Hunters Over Decades and Continents “The Feeling of Iron,” by Giaime Alonge, follows two Holocaust survivors on a quest for revenge. Credit...Miroslav Weissmuller Lea Carpenter is a novelist, screenwriter and lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. Her latest book, “Ilium,” is out in paperback. Aug. 7, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET THE FEELING OF IRON, by Giaime Alonge; translated by Clarissa Botsford.
Mile 22 im TV Programm: 02.04.
» Schnörkelloses Männerkino « Die sogenannten "Ghosts" sind Eliteagenten, welche über Landesgrenzen hinaus verdeckt agieren und sich um die Mission kümmern, bei denen alle anderen Lösungsversuche versagt haben. Zu dieser Einheit gehört auch James Silva, welcher den Diebstahl von einer erheblichen Menge radioaktivem Material in Asien aufklären soll. Nach kurzer Zeit schlägt ein einheimischer Agent Silva einen Deal vor und die Mission droht eine Gefahr für die internationale Sicherheit zu werden.
What We Lost In the Fire: On the Stories We Tell To Fill Life’s Empty Spaces
My mother’s younger sister died in a fire in her twenties. How that fire started and how it ended, where blame lay and, later, why people needed blame and needed it to lay someplace you could point to, even touch—those things were never clarified for me, and perhaps never clarified, period. No one ever told me about the firefighters, though there had to have been some.
Mile 22 im TV Programm: 05.09.
» Verschwitztes, geradliniges Männerkino « Beschreibung Die sogenannten "Ghosts" sind Eliteagenten, welche über Landesgrenzen hinaus verdeckt agieren und sich um die Mission kümmern, bei denen alle anderen Lösungsversuche versagt haben. Zu dieser Einheit gehört auch James Silva, welcher den Diebstahl von einer erheblichen Menge radioaktivem Material in Asien aufklären soll.
Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Biography, "Once Upon a Time" by Elizabeth Beller, Reviewed
Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller At the end of Camelot, Arthur has lost the war, his queen, and his knights. At the end of The Once and Future King, it is even worse: Arthur knows he will lose his life. And yet in every iteration of the Arthurian legend, he wins.
The Princess in the Tribeca Loft
Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy by Elizabeth Beller At the end of Camelot, Arthur has lost the war, his queen, and his knights. At the end of The Once and Future King, it is even worse: Arthur knows he will lose his life. And yet in every iteration of the Arthurian legend, he wins.
At long last...
In this episode of Books & Whatnot, Suzanne and Beth discuss their recent reads... and a lot of whatnot.
Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye
April Movie Preview (2024) Keith Kimbell The month ahead will bring new films from Alex Garland, Luca Guadagnino, Dev Patel, and more. To help you plan your moviegoing options, our editors have selected the most notable films releasing in April 2024, listed in alphabetical order.
Michael Korda Discusses His New Book, "Muse of Fire," on the Soldier-Poets of W.W. I
William Shakespeare never fought in a war. And yet every soldier knows Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, the “band of brothers” speech, the one so many veterans cannot recite without emotion. The speech’s power comes not only from the playwright’s language but, perhaps even more, from the fact that the speaker, Henry, knows the cost, and the honor, that come from having seen slaughter up close.
Feed Your Read: April's 5 must-devour books from Finley's Fiction
Hey, hey book worms! It’s time for your monthly page-turner installment of “Feed Your Read,” where we check in with one of our favorite local, indie bookstores on what they’re excited about in books for the month ahead. For April, we had a great chat with Finley Shaw, owner of Finley’s Fiction (8 Grand Ave., Shelter Island, 203-650-7616) — who just opened for the season Easter weekend (welcome back, Finley!).
Review of Ilium by Lea Carpenter
BookBrowse: A woman becomes part of an espionage network after her husband's sudden death. Let me confess that I don't watch a lot of spy movies or read spy novels because the plots are too much to keep up with. Please consider that information an extra endorsement for Ilium by Lea Carpenter, a spy novel that's blissfully accessible. Perhaps I clicked with it because it's much more than a spy novel; it's a story about identity and relationships of all kinds.
Summary and Reviews of Ilium by Lea Carpenter
Book Summary Set in the dark world of international espionage, from London to Mallorca, Croatia, Paris, and Cap Ferret: the gripping and suspenseful story of a young woman who unwittingly becomes a perfect asset in the long overdue finale of a covert special op The young English narrator of Lea Carpenter's dazzling new novel has grown up unhappily in London, dreaming of escape, pretending to be someone else and obsessed with a locked private garden.
A spy's biggest mission may be investigating herself in novel 'Ilium'
A British spy narrates Lea Carpenter's latest novel, a work of dazzling eloquence and sensitivity. The prose demands that readers pay close attention — not because there are confusing leaps or twists, but because the slightest detail or gesture conveys so much information. The writing is controlled but not cold; on the contrary, Carpenter allows the narrator great sweeps of emotion that are some of the novel's finest passages.
A John le Carré Biography and Documentary Revisit the Spy Novelist's Complicated Past
Charm in the secret world is placed very high on the list of desirable qualities. It’s called, in recruitment terms, ‘entertainment value.’ And at its baldest, it means that your wretched little agent, stuck somewhere, is going to look forward to seeing you. He or she is run-down, exhausted, lying to her employers, and she wants to be turned into a goddess for the evening, and she wants to be listened to—she wants a confessor.
ILIUM | Kirkus Reviews
An edgy confessional novel with the trappings of spy fiction. A lonely young London woman is unknowingly drawn into a high-stakes intelligence campaign by the man she marries. Nearly 21, the never-named woman who narrates the novel is targeted by Marcus, a worldly, jet-setting American who happens to own the private garden she spent hours dreamily gazing at as a child.
LingQ rebuilds global language learning app and launches LingQ 5.0
Mark Kaufmann, CEO & Co-founder of LingQ sits in his office in West Vancouver, BC, Canada LingQ's reader in sentence view, shows a highlighted LingQ word and background highlighting that scrolls readerboard style across the words as they are spoken aloud in the audio track Complete redesign provides language learners with a comprehensive, multi-format digital space to personalize learning through design, methodology and content WEST VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA, December 8, 2022 /...
LingQ rebuilds global language learning app and launches Original
West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Dec. 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LingQ, a global player in the all-in-one language learning edtech market, using artificial intelligence (“AI”) and comprehensible input theory of language learning, has announced the launch of LingQ 5.0. LingQ 5.0 is a complete redesign of its previous 4.0 version.
Martina Mondadori e Ashley Hicks: ritrovare il senso delle radici
«Le radici sono fondamentali nel mondo d’oggi, ancora di più dopo la pandemia», dice Martina Mondadori, in piedi sul pianerottolo del suo appartamento a Milano, accanto al compagno Ashley Hicks. Martina si è trasferita da Londra a Milano con i suoi tre figli, Leonardo, Tancredi e Cosima, per essere più vicina alla madre, Paola Zanussi, e per riavvicinare i bambini alle radici italiane.
Una casa que rinde tributo a la Alta Decoración (¿la inesperada tendencia de 2022?)
Regresar al sitio que te vio nacer para conectar con tus orígenes. Eso es lo que ha hecho Martina Mondadori, editora y fundadora de la revista Cabana, que ha dejado Londres para volver a su Milán natal, acompañada de su pareja y de sus tres hijos. "Las raíces son esenciales", comenta, "y más cuando la situación acompaña". De una forma casi premonitoria, tomó la decisión de mudarse justo antes de que la pandemia apagase el mundo.
Zibby Books LLC - Zibby Owens
Author Email * Author Bio * No more than 1-2 paragraphs. Agent Email * Agent Firm * Book Title * Genre (Fiction or Memoir?) * Elevator Pitch in 2-3 sentences * 2-3 Comparable Book Titles ("Comps") * Who Should We Contact If We're Interested?!?!? *
On Fathers and The Art of Grieving
The following essay originally appears at We Found Time. * I opened Instagram this morning to find a post from a close friend whose father died yesterday. Here were the images she had chosen: her father holding her and her sisters on his lap (gentle); her father as a young man in swim trunks (handsome); her father by her side on her wedding day (traditional). She wrote about how he was her rock, how he quoted poetry, and also how he knew success in life didn’t come from money or power.
THE ART OF GRIEVING | By Lea Carpenter — Zibby Owens
I opened Instagram this morning to find a post from a close friend whose father died yesterday. Here were the images she had chosen: her father holding her and her sisters on his lap (gentle); her father as a young man in swim trunks (handsome); her father by her side on her wedding day (traditional). She wrote about how he was her rock, how he quoted poetry, and also how he knew success in life didn’t come from money or power. The post wasn’t about her pain, though she must have woken up in pain.
In Tragedy, Kennedy Quoted Aeschylus
On the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy had to give a speech. In a world before blogs, Kennedy was in the awkward, yet history-making position of having to break news to his audience; this was the first the Indiana crowd had heard of King’s death. The speech is exceptional, even when considered within the canon of Kennedy’s often classic, and often literary, brilliance. You can see the video here.
How Jordan Roth, Richie Jackson, Daryl Roth, and Steven Roth Define Family
Hearts broken open. This is the phrase I hear when I think about Jordan Roth and Richie Jackson. And about their boys, Jackson and Levi, as well as the extended family that surrounds them, a solar system encompassing the worlds of theater, TV, publishing, real estate, and philanthropy. At its center is the preternatural kindness you feel in their presence. The first question Jordan and Richie ask when considering a creative project is how will it make people feel?
What the 'Three Women' Author Learned About Women's Sex Lives
For her debut book, Three Women, Lisa Taddeo listened to her subjects’ stories over a period of eight years. She recorded their histories of sex, love, loss, abuse. The book’s brilliance is in making new the very oldest universal experiences: falling in love for the first time, mourning the end of a marriage, how wanting the one you can’t have will almost kill you. Three Women is a reminder, or perhaps a warning: desire is a thing you can question, deny, chase—but rarely catch.
A Writer Followed 3 Women's Sex Lives for Nearly a Decade. The Result Is a Compelling Portrait of Desire
“Express yourself, don’t repress yourself/ Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” The opening lines from Madonna’s song “Human Nature” are pretty simple. And yet when it was released in 1995, the song wasn’t just a song; it was an artist’s slap back at her detractors. It was a battle cry, a lullaby, a lyric deposition on sex and a woman’s right to it. A J’accuse on a woman’s right to take risks.
This Charming 1860s Barn-Turned-Home Is AD100 Isabel López-Quesada's First Project in North America
In 2009, while temporarily ensconced in a cozy 1860s farmhouse overlooking an empty bank barn on her family’s 130-acre property in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Mati Bonetti de Buccini was dreaming up a new permanent home for her family. Now a partner and director at Atelier Fine Art Services, a firm that stores some of the world’s top collections, Buccini had relocated to the Brandywine Valley from Manhattan with her husband, a real estate developer, and their three small children.
Mom and Dad Were Spies: Two New Novels Unravel Complicated Legacies, One Secret Mission at a Time
Fiction Aug. 30, 2018 SAFE HOUSES By Dan Fesperman 405 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. RED, WHITE, BLUE By Lea Carpenter 301 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. That the phrase “the fall,” in the context of espionage fiction, usually refers to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall doesn’t entirely rinse it of its theological connotations. The Cold War has long been a backdrop against which to explore human frailties; that’s one of the reasons so many spy novels are backward-looking.
A Reunion: Discovering My Father's World War II Heroism
In the hall outside his study in our house in Wilmington, Delaware, my father had hung a small framed photograph, a group of old men on a bench wearing baseball caps. I had never asked who they were, but he may have once referred to it as “a reunion.” I didn’t think of my father as someone who attended reunions. He was a lawyer who loved poetry, history, travel. He read Greek myths to my siblings and me on drives to school, or T.S. Eliot, or the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V.
A Reunion: Discovering My Father's WWII Heroism
In the hall outside his study in our house in Wilmington, Delaware, my father had hung a small framed photograph, a group of old men on a bench wearing baseball caps. I had never asked who they were, but he may have once referred to it as “a reunion.” I didn’t think of my father as someone who attended reunions. He was a lawyer who loved poetry, history, travel. He read Greek myths to my siblings and me on drives to school, or T.S. Eliot, or the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V.
RED, WHITE, BLUE
The day before Anna's wedding in Switzerland, her powerfully connected, globe-trotting father mysteriously dies on a ski slope. It's only after his death that she learns just how deep the mysteries around him run. During her belated honeymoon in the south of France, she has an encounter in a hotel bar with a CIA case worker who tells her that her father, Noel, was a cohort of his at the agency.
It’s Time for Women to Take Over Spy Fiction - Guns, Ego, and Being Told a Genre Is Off Limits
A few years ago I went to Academi, formerly known as Blackwater, the military training center in Moyock, North Carolina. I’d spent the night before in Virginia Beach then driven out early with friends who had been there before and, a little like people who love repeat trips to Disney World, they acted like kids en route to a very large candy store.
This Trailblazing Black-Owned Bookstore Is Starting Conversations in D.C.
“Culture and community have always been who we are,” says Ramunda Young, one half of the couple behind the beloved 11-year-old online retailer Mahogany Books, which opened its first brick-and-mortar shop late last year. The bookstore, situated in Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia, is the predominantly black neighborhood’s first in more than 20 years—a fact Ramunda herself calls “unfathomable” in what is widely considered the country’s most literate city.
Summer Reading: This Season’s Ultimate Fiction List
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk closes out her autofictional trilogy (the first two installments, Outline and Transit, were published in 2014 and 2016, respectively) with Kudos (FSG), which finds its narrator on her way to Europe to speak at a literary festival. Characteristically, the novel is propelled by its narrator’s ability to draw out stories from the strangers and acquaintances she runs into.
Beast Fiction: Lea Carpenter’s ‘Clean’
They met in grad school, a place some people go when they want to change, become new. They met in grad school, a place some people go when they want to change, become new. He was preparing for a big job at Notre Dame. She was preparing for marriage, perhaps. They met in “math camp,” this absurd if rigorous week of classes you take if you can’t add, before they throw you to the wolves in Corporate Finance.
Authors Matt Gallagher and Lea Carpenter Talk Sex, War and Writing
Matt Gallagher’s bright green Chucks stand in sly contrast to his low-key demeanor. He’s a writer from Reno who now lives in New York City, and a former U.S. Army captain who turned his wartime blog into a memoir, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. He also writes fiction, including Babylon, his short story for Playboy’s July/August issue, about a lesbian kickball umpire and Marine named Marti who’s still adjusting to post-deployment life in Brooklyn.
Showtime CIA Documentary Spymasters
Before he wrote Harlot’s Ghost, his novel about the Central Intelligence Agency, Norman Mailer wrote an essay proposing five “models” for understanding the organization. He knew (and Le Carré did, too): The CIA is a vast bureaucracy staffed by gifted, if not necessarily glamorous, civil servants. He wasn’t drawn to the subject for the plot possibilities, though they exist. Rather he was interested in a culture completely organized around secrecy and myth.
Beast Fiction: Lea Carpenter’s ‘Swan’
In the latest installment in our series of original fiction, previous contributor Lea Carpenter delivers a story that’s part fairy tale, part dream, part nightmare. It was a coping mechanism, the letters. In the evenings, after everything was settled and when she was alone, she would take her old papers, the ones too chic to bear a monogram. She would handwrite them, in blue pen.
Veterans of the Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan Have Turned Combat into Literature
‘Never such innocence again,” Philip Larkin wrote in “MCMXIV,” his iconic poem about World War I. The Great War changed many things and left legacies such as indirect fire, automatic weapons, a renewed German will. It also changed literary tradition, leaving modernism rising in its wake. A select set of writers who emerged from that conflict became celebrated for their gift of turning slaughter into poetry and prose.
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