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★★☆☆☆ Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, set at a quiet New England town, is a fairly derivative work that fails to rise above long-established industry plot scaffolding. Its writing style isn’t completely stale,...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ All literature is the product of its history, possessing dormant traits of the author’s precursors and contemporaries. Whether inspired or incited by these sources, stories emerge from stories, and...
★★★★☆ In 2012, Will Self published Umbrella, an under-read masterwork of Joycean proportions that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Umbrella reads as if Self found a loose thread in the conceptual stitching of...
★★★★☆ With its epigraph from Ulysses and a revealing synopsis printed in the book’s front-endpapers, it is apparent from the start that Will Self’s Umbrella (shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize) will not...
★★☆☆☆ Asymmetry reads like the product of a promising young writer having completed a very good creative writing MFA program, who is subsequently unable to write much beyond a meta discussion of everything she...
★★★★☆ Carmen Maria Machado’s debut Her Body and Other Parties is a stunningly good collection of unsettling tales, each of which grow beyond their bodily horrors into metaphorical meditations on sex and identity. Using...
★★★★☆ After staying for a few months at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found mysteriously dead in his room on March 24, 1946. He was due...
★★★★☆ Before we moved out west, my wife and I lived in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn for three years. It was a strange, beautiful neighborhood, an oasis of massive, single-family Victorian homes nestled between busy...
★★★★☆ The second volume of her seasonal tetralogy, Ali Smith’s Winter is a hazy Christmastime tale about a family reuniting over the winter holiday. Like Autumn before it, Winter uses a relatively simple plot to...
