Built by Roma Agrawal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The wind blows, the ground shakes, and your home remains standing whether it is stick-built or a skyscraper of steel and concrete. There are specific reasons why this is...
Category: Book Reviews
A Good Idea by Cristina Moracho
★★☆☆☆ After graduating high school, Finley leaves her mom in NYC to visit her dad in Maine for the summer. But as Cristina Moracho shows in A Good Idea, everything has changed since Finley’s...
Don’t Save Anything by James Salter
★★★☆☆ When James Salter died in 2015, he left behind some of the best American novels of the twentieth century. His 1957 debut, The Hunters, is a harrowing story of the Korean War built...
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern
★★☆☆☆ Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, set at a quiet New England town, is a fairly derivative work that fails to rise above long-established industry plot scaffolding. Its writing style isn’t completely stale,...
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...
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...
