Author: Alex Yard

★★★★☆ If you’ve never heard of Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success is the book to win you over and send you to Goodreads to add his entire back catalogue on your to-read list. With five...

★★☆☆☆ Nevada Days is Bernardo Axtaga’s barely-fictionalized novel chronicling his stay as a writer-in-residence at the Center for Basque Studies in Reno, Nevada. Outside the campus library, there’s a stall where they make coffee...

★★★☆☆ U.S. Representative-turned-novelist Steve Israel delivers his second novel Big Guns, which carries the torch of the 2005 comedy film Thank You for Smoking—it’s the satirical tale of an industry that revels in its...

★★★★★ Debut novelists disproportionately tend to write about aspiring writers. This often indicates the author’s mere desire to write, rather than actually having something of value to express. But this need not always be...

★★☆☆☆ Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, set at a quiet New England town, is a fairly derivative work that fails to rise above long-established industry plot scaffolding.  Its writing style isn’t completely stale,...

★★☆☆☆ Asymmetry reads like the product of a promising young writer having completed a very good creative writing MFA program, who is subsequently unable to write much beyond a meta discussion of everything she...

★★☆☆☆ Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s The Library at the Edge of the World is a feast of the senses for the middle aged female reader. Bonus points if: you love comfortably safe prose, you can juggle...