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...
Category: Literature
The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
★★★☆☆ It is a common enough image in painting: a nude woman descending stairs. In his new novel The Woman on the Stairs, Bernhard Schlink turns this single motif into a complete world with an...
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
★★★★☆ Ottessa Moshfegh writes great stories about terrible people: from perverts to addicts to the cripplingly lonesome, her stories illuminate the fetid, mildewed corners of society with a critical yet surprisingly forgiving eye. Moshfegh...
The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
★★★☆☆ Undoubtedly operating in the shadow of Ernest Cline’s 80’s nostalgia-fest Ready Player One, debut author Jason Rekulak offers The Impossible Fortress. It’s the story of a high-school nerd with a knack for video...
Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith
★★★★☆ Maben and her daughter Annalee walk along a lonely highway, a black garbage bag of clothes their only possession. Three days of “walking to nowhere with nothing” have rendered them dead tired, nearly...
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
★★★★☆ With Marvel reinventing Norse gods like Thor and Loki for the screen, it seems appropriate that someone should come along to breathe new life into the stories of these and the other Scandinavian...
Human Acts by Han Kang
★★★★☆ Harrowing and brutal, Han Kang’s Human Acts is exactly the sort of political novel the world needs in 2017. While her story is specific to a single historical moment, Kang’s account of a...
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag
★★☆☆☆ A Bangladore family in the spice trade is faced with a crisis of interdependence. The narrator’s uncle managed to transform their family into wealthy entrepreneurs (doing so practically overnight), and each member of...
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
★★★★☆ This splendid collection of short stories could not have appeared at a more appropriate time. Immigrants and refugees are under attack from the highest levels of government to the lowest level of individual...
