We help readers find great books.
★★★★★ Haruki Murakami may be the most important thing to have happened to contemporary Japanese literature in translation, but he’s also become one of the most important things for the genre to overcome. “Murakami-esque”...
★★★★☆ “I’m struggling to finish this PhD dissertation, so instead I’ll transmute it into a novel about a graduate student struggling badly to finish her PhD dissertation,” thought debut novelist Juliet Lapidos. (Possibly.) While...
★★★☆☆ In 2012, Colm Tóibín published New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a collection of literary essays about writers and their families. This excellent book compiled texts ranging in subject from nineteenth century Irish...
★★☆☆☆ Sarah Selecky’s debut novel Radiant Shimmering Light is the kind of book that sounds intriguing when boiled down to its elevator pitch, yet stumbles extensively in its actual execution. It’s a story incapable...
★★★★★ Welcome Home is one piece of a two-part follow-up to the celebrated posthumous 2015 publication of Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. Unlike the occasionally impressive but overreaching Evening in Paradise,...
★★★★☆ Reading Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest is an experience of recognizing the ineffable: feelings of dread, paranoia, and angst adopt eerie and familiar forms in these twelve excellent stories. Dávila’s work echoes Nikolai Gogol...
★★★★☆ The Frolic of the Beasts is an overlooked melodrama by Yukio Mishima, one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of the twentieth century. Mishima was highly prolific and politically active throughout his life,...
★★★★☆ To say that The Overstory is a book about trees would be like saying Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. Richard Powers’ latest novel is a multi-layered, multi-generational epic that interweaves the...
★★★★☆ Alyson Hagy’s Scribe is a strange creature, a mutant hybrid of dystopian fiction and fireside lore. In a land ravaged by disease and strife, one woman survives by trading her ability to write...
