The Dark Stuff by Donald S. Murray
★★☆☆☆ Sub-titled “Stories From the Peatlands,” The Dark Stuff is far too textbook-like and not appealing enough for the casual reader. The facts are very nice but the writing does not resonate: it just...
Category: Book Reviews
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin
★★★★★ Haruki Murakami may be the most important thing to have happened to contemporary Japanese literature in translation, but he’s also become one of the most important things for the genre to overcome. “Murakami-esque”...
Talent by Juliet Lapidos
★★★★☆ “I’m struggling to finish this PhD dissertation, so instead I’ll transmute it into a novel about a graduate student struggling badly to finish her PhD dissertation,” thought debut novelist Juliet Lapidos. (Possibly.) While...
Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister
★★★★☆ Chances are that if you’ve picked up Good and Mad, you are already there. That’s by design. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger is channeling liberal women’s anger into an exposition...
Anesthesia by Kate Cole-Adams
★★★★☆ Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness “explores perhaps the most brilliant and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables doctors and dentists to carry out surgery and...
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín
★★★☆☆ In 2012, Colm Tóibín published New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a collection of literary essays about writers and their families. This excellent book compiled texts ranging in subject from nineteenth century Irish...
Radiant Shimmering Light by Sarah Selecky
★★☆☆☆ Sarah Selecky’s debut novel Radiant Shimmering Light is the kind of book that sounds intriguing when boiled down to its elevator pitch, yet stumbles extensively in its actual execution. It’s a story incapable...
Best Books of 2018
This year, Run Spot Run has had the pleasure of reviewing ninety books ranging from high literature to historical nonfiction to comics and graphic novels. It’s an honor to share our opinions and help...
Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin
★★★★★ Welcome Home is one piece of a two-part follow-up to the celebrated posthumous 2015 publication of Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. Unlike the occasionally impressive but overreaching Evening in Paradise,...
