We help readers find great books.
★★★☆☆ Split into a prism of countless fractured narratives, Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral pieces together the story of the religious Stuart family, who moves into the neighborhood of Cienfuegos, Cuba to begin construction...
★★★★★ Set on an unforgiving island in Finmark, Norway, The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a chilling feminist thriller that happens to also be well-researched historical fiction, based on the real-life witch trials...
★★★★☆ There’s a terrific 1939 painting by Edward Hopper called “New York Movie.” It’s divided, though not quite halved, into two fields: on the left of the canvas, the shadowy elegance of a mid-century...
★★★★★ Fourteen year-old Georgina Vitay feels her life is over: her father, a decorated General in Budapest, has decided to send her to boarding school. To Gina, the Bishop Matula Academy (a traditional, religious...
★★★★☆ An unnecessary but quietly pleasant return to the world of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is another collection of related short stories loosely centered around old Mrs. Kitteridge, the...
★★★☆☆ In Speech and Debate competitions, there’s a technique used by debaters known as “the spread.” Instead of offering a pointed rebuttal to their opponent’s latest argument, a debater will attempt to overload the...
★★☆☆☆ With his Ibis Trilogy, published between 2008 and 2015, Amitav Ghosh proved himself an estimable literary force: framed around the Opium Wars of the mid 1800s and set in Calcutta, Mauritius, and Hong...
★★★★★ Consider it Patient Zero, or Pandora’s Box: all of Western Literature can arguably be traced back to Cervantes’s 1605/1615 masterpiece Don Quixote. A picaresque novel about a mad knight errant and his squire...
★★★★☆ A curiously timely novel set around an Arizona homestead in the late 1890s, Téa Obreht’s excellent Inland finds a vein of magical realism in the reliably fruitful ores of Western Literature. When Nora’s...
