Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz
★★★★★ “So, 007 is dead.” “Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.” The suit had kept its shape, M reflected. It was the man lying there, dripping wet and lifeless, who had lost his. Ian Fleming...
Category: Book Reviews
The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila
★★★★☆ Reading Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest is an experience of recognizing the ineffable: feelings of dread, paranoia, and angst adopt eerie and familiar forms in these twelve excellent stories. Dávila’s work echoes Nikolai Gogol...
The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima
★★★★☆ The Frolic of the Beasts is an overlooked melodrama by Yukio Mishima, one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of the twentieth century. Mishima was highly prolific and politically active throughout his life,...
Bunk by Kevin Young
★★★★☆ Kevin Young’s Bunk is an absolutely delightful, well-researched journey through the minefields of “Hoaxes, Humbugs, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.” From the public’s gullibility that made P.T. Barnum rich to Internet trolls,...
In the Hurricane’s Eye by Nathaniel Philbrick
★★★★★ The final installment in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Revolutionary War trilogy may be the strongest yet. First, Bunker Hill covered the opening salvoes of what came to be a protracted war of attrition. Then Valiant Ambition explored the...
The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
★★★☆☆ It’s fitting that Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection The End of the End of the Earth begins with a neurotic exploration of the essay format itself. Opening with this kind of self-doubt suggests that...
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin
★★★☆☆ In 2015, Lucia Berlin’s (1936-2004) posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women was a sensation. FSG presented her short stories as the work of an under-recognized master and readers reveled in her lost-in-time...
The Overstory by Richard Powers
★★★★☆ To say that The Overstory is a book about trees would be like saying Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. Richard Powers’ latest novel is a multi-layered, multi-generational epic that interweaves the...
Old Demons, New Deities, edited by Tenzin Dickie
★★★★☆ Tibet, despite its difficulties, is producing extraordinary writers. The groundbreaking Old Demons, New Deities stands as the first English-language anthology of contemporary Tibetan literature. Edited and introduced by Tenzin Dickie, these twenty-one stories...
