The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
★★★★☆ The self-reflective metafictional novel – a book that, with a tilted head and a squint, appears to be written by one of its characters – is an engaging and dizzying concept that has...
Category: Literature
A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan
★★★★☆ A Window Opens is a stellar example of what can be done with a genre novel, a model of the “working mom” genre. While it will never be viewed as classic literature, Elisabeth...
Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving
★★★★★ Age cannot diminish nor practice stale the writing power of John Irving. In Avenue of Mysteries, his fourteenth novel, we see the full display of his authoritative voice. Humor and pathos are wrapped...
The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson
★☆☆☆☆ William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale may be his most confounding play. With a first act full of inconsolable tragedy, The Winter’s Tale derails into a pastoral comedy of forgiveness; it is an enigmatic,...
Quicksand by Steve Toltz
★★★★☆ Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a maniacally funny novel about friendship, hope and the human condition; it is a work at once soul-lifting and spirit-crushing, capable of eliciting both uproarious laughter and inward cringe...
Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash
★★★★☆ Ron Rash’s newest novel utilizes the dual nature of the best of Southern literature. Above the Waterfall is told through the voices of two protagonists, one reflecting Southern noir; the other the voice...
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano
★★★☆☆ 2014 Nobel Prizewinner Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood is a curious novella that subverts the noir genre with a story more about narrative and memory than any specific...
The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses
★★☆☆☆ Feverish, recursive thoughts and a lachrymose prose are the key features of The Hundred Year Flood, a debut novel ten years in the making. It focuses on Tee, a half-Korean boy who, after...
The Blue Guitar by John Banville
★★★★★ John Banville is an astonishing wordsmith and delivers with The Blue Guitar a rhapsodic novel from the upper echelons of contemporary literature. His sentences are for savoring: ambrosiac chains of clauses so good...
