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★★★★★ Wickedly unsettling and alluring, Charles Burns’s graphic novel Last Look was originally published in three separate hardcover volumes between 2010 and 2014: X’ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull. Typically, omnibus editions are...
★★★★☆ When politicians invoke the “threat of radical Islam,” this typically features imagery of automatic weapons, plane crashes, and IEDs. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission suggests an alternate, perhaps more powerful arsenal: textbooks and bank...
★★★★☆ As I began to read this, my concern quickly grew that I was reading another far-fetched identification of the young man who complements the “Dark Lady” of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. My reservations were...
★★★★☆ Shakespeare in Swahililand is a valuable addition to one’s Shakespeare collection, for it reveals in a delightful and insightful manner the global reach of Shakespeare’s work. Like the worlds Shakespeare created, “Swahililand” does...
★★★★★ Let’s consider floating a transitional state, stuck between flying and falling. It’s the top of an arc, a beautiful moment of momentary weightlessness before crashing back to earth. Mathematically speaking, there’s a brief...
★★★★☆ Mary Higgins Clark has been writing thrilling mysteries for decades. The Sleeping Beauty Killer, the fourth book about TV producer Laurie Moran, is her third collaboration with Alafair Burke. The Sleeping Beauty Killer finds...
★★☆☆☆ Ha Jin’s The Boat Rocker is a scathing satire about Chinese-American patriotism and intellectual integrity. When young Chinese immigrant Yan Haili’s 9/11-exploiting novel Love and Death in September gets a publicity bump from...
★★★★☆ Bellevue Hospital in New York City is nearly synonymous with mental illness, but it is so much more: One of the earliest medical facilities in the Colonies, it began as an almshouse, a...
★★☆☆☆ Peter Orner keeps books under the seat of his car “for long lights”, and has thrown one of these books from from his car’s window after reading an irksome passage. He flings books...
