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★★★★☆ 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,...
★★★★★ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ Alyson Hagy’s Scribe is a strange creature, a mutant hybrid of dystopian fiction and fireside lore. In a land ravaged by disease and strife, one woman survives by trading her ability to write...
★★★★☆ Sure, every generation despises the cultural values of the generation that rises to replace it. If you’re 50, scientific laws guarantee that music popular among contemporary 15-year-olds will sound awful to you. In...
★★★☆☆ Mitch Albom’s The Next Person You Meet in Heaven is his fifteen-years-later sequel to The Five People You Meet In Heaven, which follows in its predecessor’s path tightly. It embraces the original’s structure...
