Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
★★★★☆ Step aside for a moment, Easy Rawlings: there is a new gumshoe in town, and he is out to do the right thing even if it might involve doing the wrong thing. Joe...
Category: Book Reviews
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian
★★☆☆☆ When it was first published in The New Yorker in December 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” went viral. Its buzz is well-deserved (although maybe not worth the subsequent seven-figure book deal): the story...
The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer
★★★★☆ Is The Age of Light worth a million bucks? If you follow the book business, it’s a question you’ll be asking yourself the minute you pick up author Whitney Scharer’s debut novel, which...
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...
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...
