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★★★★★ The existence of the Holy Grail may be the most enduring legend in Christendom. It first entered our permanent consciousness in an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th Century....
★★★★☆ Following his 2013 parable The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee returns to Simón, Davíd and Inés’s story in The Schooldays of Jesus (longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize) as they settle in the...
★★★★☆ A compulsively readable contemporary fable, The Childhood of Jesus is an allegory about two immigrants, a boy and his guardian, and their difficulties acclimating to life in a new city. Davíd is a...
★★★☆☆ It is a common enough image in painting: a nude woman descending stairs. In his new novel The Woman on the Stairs, Bernhard Schlink turns this single motif into a complete world with an...
★★★★☆ Ottessa Moshfegh writes great stories about terrible people: from perverts to addicts to the cripplingly lonesome, her stories illuminate the fetid, mildewed corners of society with a critical yet surprisingly forgiving eye. Moshfegh...
★★★★☆ In twenty years of foreign correspondence throughout Egypt, Iraq and Syria, journalist Richard Engel has no doubt covered a myriad of horrific incidents. Consider this episode from 2005 that occurred on Baghdad’s Imma...
★★★☆☆ Undoubtedly operating in the shadow of Ernest Cline’s 80’s nostalgia-fest Ready Player One, debut author Jason Rekulak offers The Impossible Fortress. It’s the story of a high-school nerd with a knack for video...
★★★★☆ Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund’s Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game is a mesmerizing correspondence about the World Cup in 2014 that quickly grows into a text about so much more...
★★★★☆ Why do we write? Why do so many school kids say they are going to be writers? What causes the disconnect between that desire and its actual execution? We write to learn, to...
