The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
★★★☆☆ 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...
Category: Book Reviews
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
★★★★☆ 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...
And Then All Hell Broke Loose by Richard Engel
★★★★☆ 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...
The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
★★★☆☆ 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...
Home and Away by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund
★★★★☆ 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...
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin
★★★★☆ 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...
Waves Passing in the Night by Lawrence Weschler
★★★★☆ Walter Murch is a dreamer, an insatiable intellectual who looks towards the ends of the universe for continued astonishment and inspiration. His celebrated career in film and sound editing (and his three Academy Awards)...
Better Living Through Criticism by A.O. Scott
★★★★☆ Everyone’s a critic, and for good reason. That’s A.O. Scott’s declaration in Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, in which Scott dissects the nature of criticism, digging...
Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith
★★★★☆ Maben and her daughter Annalee walk along a lonely highway, a black garbage bag of clothes their only possession. Three days of “walking to nowhere with nothing” have rendered them dead tired, nearly...
