Author: Alex Yard

★★★☆☆ Belle Boggs’ first novel The Gulf takes a few interesting toys out of the toy chest, lines them all up, then abruptly sweeps them into the trash. The novel succeeds when humorously skewering...

★★★★☆ Dave Eggers’ The Parade is a concise, finely executed work of understated elegance. It’s the kind of extended parable that need not flood you with backstory about its principal characters, and is even...

★★☆☆☆ Unwarranted comparisons to 1984 should be punished with the severity of Orwellian dictatorships. Ben H. Winters really wants his novel Golden State to land among the authoritarian greats, but he spends too much...

★★★★☆ Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is one of few recent novels with something salient to portray about our current Trump era. Compare this to last year’s Gary Shteyngart novel Lake Success, which, while...

★★★★☆ “I’m struggling to finish this PhD dissertation, so instead I’ll transmute it into a novel about a graduate student struggling badly to finish her PhD dissertation,” thought debut novelist Juliet Lapidos. (Possibly.) While...

★★☆☆☆ Sarah Selecky’s debut novel Radiant Shimmering Light is the kind of book that sounds intriguing when boiled down to its elevator pitch, yet stumbles extensively in its actual execution. It’s a story incapable...

★★★★☆ Sure, every generation despises the cultural values of the generation that rises to replace it. If you’re 50, scientific laws guarantee that music popular among contemporary 15-year-olds will sound awful to you. In...

★★★☆☆ Mitch Albom’s The Next Person You Meet in Heaven is his fifteen-years-later sequel to The Five People You Meet In Heaven, which follows in its predecessor’s path tightly. It embraces the original’s structure...