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★★★★☆ “Ero Guro Nansensu” is a slippery categorization: originally coined in the 1930s to describe a particularly decadent movement in Japanese art and literature, it has since seeped outside its borders into increasingly ribald...
★★★☆☆ Poetry exists in the ears of the beholder. Sound—listened to out loud or internally—grabs one first. As the words wrap into our consciousness, we begin to feel their depth and value. We move...
★★★★☆ Last autumn, as if to give Karl Ove Knausgaard fans something to read while the sixth volume of My Struggle was being translated, a quick series of four books emerged from Penguin Press....
★★★★☆ In Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye has written an encompassing and enlightening review of walls through the centuries, ranging from 2000 B.C. to the present. A “Selected Timeline”...
★★★★☆ Women have been secondary characters in war stories often enough that it’s jarring when when we are presented with a literary breath of fresh air like the main characters in Fruit of the Drunken...
★★★★★ In Washington Black (longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize), Esi Edugyan imbues a Victorian-era storytelling sensibility into an American origin story. The saga of the slave George Washington Black, a “disfigured black boy...
★★★★☆ If you’ve never heard of Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success is the book to win you over and send you to Goodreads to add his entire back catalogue on your to-read list. With five...
★★★★☆ What is the cost of living? How do our choices affect us? What compromises must we make in order to have a fulfilling life? By what metrics do we measure the days of...
★★★★★ No Good Alternative is the second half of William T. Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies, a sprawling two-volume presentation on the world’s energy consumption and its resultant environmental dangers. Together, the two parts of Carbon...
