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★★★★☆ Women have been secondary characters in war stories often enough that it’s jarring when when we are presented with a literary breath of fresh air like the main characters in Fruit of the Drunken...
★★★★★ In Washington Black (longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize), Esi Edugyan imbues a Victorian-era storytelling sensibility into an American origin story. The saga of the slave George Washington Black, a “disfigured black boy...
★★★★☆ If you’ve never heard of Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success is the book to win you over and send you to Goodreads to add his entire back catalogue on your to-read list. With five...
★★★★☆ Originally published in 1966 and reissued this summer by Picador, J.G. Ballard’s fourth novel The Crystal World is a metaphysical, conceptual adventure through the jungles of Africa. Edward Sanders, a doctor specializing in...
★★★☆☆ Building a novel in threads is an easy way to create a seemingly elaborate literary system. Many authors construct their books with a series of alternating chapters, each named after the current moment’s...
★★☆☆☆ Nevada Days is Bernardo Axtaga’s barely-fictionalized novel chronicling his stay as a writer-in-residence at the Center for Basque Studies in Reno, Nevada. Outside the campus library, there’s a stall where they make coffee...
★★★☆☆ Benjamin Black’s “historical fantasy…(shows that) real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.” Wolf on a String is a brooding historical noir that imagines the sordid underbelly of Rudolf’s court...
★★★☆☆ Speeding home from his London office, thirty-five-year-old Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land surrounded by speeding traffic. Dazed and wounded from his accident, Maitland...
★★☆☆☆ While abandoned orphans fight and starve in Darfur, Rachel Khong offers Goodbye, Vitamin, the story of how her first-world life could actually be a lot better, all the while taking minimal responsibility for...
