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★★★☆☆ Amit Chaudhuri upends the traditional homecoming tale with his seventh novel, Friend of My Youth. Meta-narrated by a character named Amit Chaudhuri, this short work tracks his begrudging return to Bombay to...
★★★★☆ Dave Eggers’ The Parade is a concise, finely executed work of understated elegance. It’s the kind of extended parable that need not flood you with backstory about its principal characters, and is even...
★★★★★ It’s not news that the art industry has a problem with its white-maleness — museums are grappling with these issues and mounting some of their best and most diverse shows in recent years...
★★★★★ Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill is the story of a boy fighting for survival and discovering who he wants to be. The novel begins with the narrator refusing to give his...
★★★☆☆ Written in 1948 while the author was stationed in Burma, Nothing but the Night is a curious early work by celebrated American novelist John Williams (1922-1994). The novella investigates the haunted past of...
★★★★★ Mass migration is in the news almost daily, but what’s lost in stark headlines and impassioned tweets is the human element. But people don’t leave their homes or their countries, often for good,...
★★☆☆☆ Unwarranted comparisons to 1984 should be punished with the severity of Orwellian dictatorships. Ben H. Winters really wants his novel Golden State to land among the authoritarian greats, but he spends too much...
★★★★☆ Can any book, especially one as succinct (befitting a poet) as this one, explain the myriad factors that spark the production of a poem? Regardless of the precipitating factors, the key element, according...
★★★☆☆ Compellingly anxious and paranoid, Anna Burns’ Milkman (winner of the 2018 Booker Prize) is a timely, rambling novel set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Burns’ narrator is a thoughtful eighteen-year-old woman with a...
