Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
★★☆☆☆ Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon opens a future London – a surveillance state known as the System in which millions of cameras, microphones and other sensors gather information. Health issues are a thing of the...
Category: Book Reviews
Ice by Anna Kavan
★★★☆☆ Originally published fifty years ago and recently reissued in an anniversary edition with supplemental texts by Jonathan Lethem and Kate Zambreno, Anna Kavan’s Ice is a story of a man obsessed. A nameless...
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
★★★☆☆ Translated from the Arabic, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad updates a classic from the literary canon into a devastating, modern-day political allegory. In an attempt to give a rightful burial to the countless...
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...
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...
