Last Stories by William Trevor
★★★★☆ When William Trevor passed away in 2016, it felt as if he was unanimously memorialized as a master of the short story. To many, Trevor was the essence of Irish literature, born from...
Category: Book Reviews
Darwin Comes to Town by Menno Schilthuizen
★★★★☆ The Earth is human-dominated; humans consume one quarter of all plant-produced food and half of the world’s fresh water. In 2007, the number of people living in urban areas passed the number living...
My German Brother by Chico Buarque
★★★☆☆ Although not immediately aware of the transformation, Ciccio’s life changes when he finds a decades-old letter stashed between the pages of his father’s rare edition of The Golden Bough. His father, a book...
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
★★★★★ On an overnight flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv, I was seated next to a woman who was going to visit her daughter, who’d been born in the U.S. but moved to Israel as...
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors
★★★☆☆ Translated from the Danish, Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a slight, anxious novel about self-improvement and self-acceptance. Centered around middle-aged Sonja’s decision to enroll in a driving school and finally get her...
It Don’t Come Easy by Dupuy & Berberian
★★★★☆ Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian began their celebrated Monsieur Jean series amidst the underground French comics scene of the 1990s. Centering around a small network of characters and their frequently visited cafes, bars,...
Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs
★★★★☆ Half a lifetime ago my graduate minor was anthropology with a smattering of archaeology. It was so long ago that none of the giants whose works I read and studied are even mentioned...
Moonrise by Sarah Crossan
★★★★☆ Moonrise by Sarah Crossan is a heartbreaking story of life and death that reveals how death sentences affect prisoners and their families. Joe is a teenager who’s brother Ed has been sentenced to...
First Person by Richard Flanagan
★★★★☆ Novels that feature writers have become a tired trope in contemporary literature: like Chekhov’s gun, the first sign of Microsoft Office booting up in a book will invariably result in the delivery of...
