Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ All literature is the product of its history, possessing dormant traits of the author’s precursors and contemporaries. Whether inspired or incited by these sources, stories emerge from stories, and...
Category: Book Reviews
The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Reminders of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House underpin the opening of Margery Allingham’s small and wonderful 1929 mystery novel The Crime at Black Dudley: “The view...
Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
★★★★☆ What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? These are the questions that Erling Kagge explores in Silence in the Age of Noise, recently translated...
Phone by Will Self
★★★★☆ In 2012, Will Self published Umbrella, an under-read masterwork of Joycean proportions that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Umbrella reads as if Self found a loose thread in the conceptual stitching of...
Umbrella by Will Self
★★★★☆ With its epigraph from Ulysses and a revealing synopsis printed in the book’s front-endpapers, it is apparent from the start that Will Self’s Umbrella (shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize) will not...
The Triumph of Christianity by Bart D. Ehrman
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart D. Ehrman attempts to answer the crucial question of how Christianity succeeded when other comparably small religious sects lost traction or disappeared completely....
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
★★☆☆☆ Asymmetry reads like the product of a promising young writer having completed a very good creative writing MFA program, who is subsequently unable to write much beyond a meta discussion of everything she...
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
★★★★☆ Carmen Maria Machado’s debut Her Body and Other Parties is a stunningly good collection of unsettling tales, each of which grow beyond their bodily horrors into metaphorical meditations on sex and identity. Using...
Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig
★★★★☆ After staying for a few months at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found mysteriously dead in his room on March 24, 1946. He was due...
