Before We Sleep by Jeffrey Lent
★★★★☆ Little kids ask, “Why?” Teenagers also question, but the difference is that teenagers often try to find the answers themselves. Katey Snow is 17 years old, about to leave home for college in...
Category: Literature
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
★★★★☆ In the vast world of science fiction, there is a frequent and frequently unfair desire to contextualize an individual work with comparables within its own genre. Unique voices are met with resistance, their...
Autumn by Ali Smith
★★★★★ The first part of a seasonal tetralogy, Ali Smith’s Autumn is a stunning meditation on memory and modernity, reconciling loss in our contemporary age of excess. This a perfect novel for the post-Trump,...
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
★★★★☆ Horror fiction legend H.P. Lovecraft transformed reality into mythos. His tales of the Old Gods, lurking “inside the earth or under the sea” or just beyond a distant astral plane, often begin in...
Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor
★★★★☆ Kanishk Tharoor’s impressive short stories conjure the ancient past and recall long-dead myths and legends. Tales of Iskander the Great’s world-conquering campaign are joined with stories of an elephant being escorted from Kerala...
The Futures by Anna Pitoniak
★★★☆☆ Anna Pitoniak’s debut novel The Futures is a quintessentially millennial coming of age story. A pair of undergraduates receive their diplomas, and as their graduation caps tumble to the grass, the scaffolding of...
The Lost Book of the Grail by Charlie Lovett
★★★★★ The existence of the Holy Grail may be the most enduring legend in Christendom. It first entered our permanent consciousness in an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th Century....
The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★☆ Following his 2013 parable The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee returns to Simón, Davíd and Inés’s story in The Schooldays of Jesus (longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize) as they settle in the...
The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★☆ A compulsively readable contemporary fable, The Childhood of Jesus is an allegory about two immigrants, a boy and his guardian, and their difficulties acclimating to life in a new city. Davíd is a...
