The Answers by Catherine Lacey
★★★★★ Catherine Lacey’s The Answers attempts a Tower of Babel on the subject of love—a recipe for success, yes? Love’s mechanics are fascinating, in part because its inner workings are partially unknowable, the je...
Category: Literature
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
★★★★☆ A facile description of Sheila Heti’s brilliant latest book is that Motherhood is about a female writer in her late thirties who is trying to decide whether to have a child, and what...
Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya
★★★☆☆ Comprising eighteen stories, Aetherial Worlds is Tatyana Tolstaya’s first collection to be translated into English in more than twenty years. Tolstaya’s stories phase between styles, content and themes, flickering through essays, memoirs, and...
Last Stories by William Trevor
★★★★☆ When William Trevor passed away in 2016, it felt as if he was unanimously memorialized as a master of the short story. To many, Trevor was the essence of Irish literature, born from...
My German Brother by Chico Buarque
★★★☆☆ Although not immediately aware of the transformation, Ciccio’s life changes when he finds a decades-old letter stashed between the pages of his father’s rare edition of The Golden Bough. His father, a book...
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
★★★★★ On an overnight flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv, I was seated next to a woman who was going to visit her daughter, who’d been born in the U.S. but moved to Israel as...
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors
★★★☆☆ Translated from the Danish, Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a slight, anxious novel about self-improvement and self-acceptance. Centered around middle-aged Sonja’s decision to enroll in a driving school and finally get her...
First Person by Richard Flanagan
★★★★☆ Novels that feature writers have become a tired trope in contemporary literature: like Chekhov’s gun, the first sign of Microsoft Office booting up in a book will invariably result in the delivery of...
Tomb Song by Julián Herbert
★★☆☆☆ Julián Herbert’s kaleidoscopic, autobiographical novel Tomb Song is a paean to his dying mother, written in what feels like a real-time bedside scrawl. “I’ve endeavored to draw a freehand portrait of my mother,”...
