We help readers find great books.
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★☆☆☆ The promise of Robert Wright’s title is not fulfilled in this personal narrative of his journey toward enlightenment and a deeper understanding of Buddhism. The Appendix of Why Buddhism Is True finally reveals...
★★★★★ Book reviews, literary essays and literary criticism all appear to belong under the same heading of “writing about books,” but the difference between these three fields is more nuanced that some may think....
★★★★☆ In Bones of My Grandfather, Clay Evans recalls his boyhood fascination with World War II, specifically being mesmerized by his mother’s father, a war hero “whose legend had hung like a morning mist...
★★★★☆ Mark Kurlansky writes that milk is a “10,000-year-old controversy. When you think about it, it was a pretty weird thing to begin with, the idea that we could replace mothers with secretions from...
★★★★★ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
