Barkskins by Annie Proulx
★★★★☆ In 1693, in a muddy riverbank settlement of New France, René Sel and Charles Duquet meet their new master Monsieur Trépagny and journey inland to begin a new settlement. With the promise of...
Category: Book Reviews
Melville in Love by Michael Shelden
★★★★★ The clues were always there, hidden in plain sight. Biographer after biographer, essayist after essayist saw the information; some missed it completely. No one who saw the clues put them together until now....
Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis
★★★★☆ Charles Dickens is dead; long live Charles Dickens. Stephen Jarvis has channeled the Great Man in his superb retelling of how The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club came to be and the...
The Truth About Death by Robert Hellenga
★★★★☆ We do not like to talk about death. It is difficult to confront the possibility of ours or of those we love. In The Truth About Death, Hellenga brings wit, wisdom, and unforgettable...
Lions by Bonnie Nadzam
★★☆☆☆ Bonnie Nadzam’s Lions feels composed from the Whistle-Stop Cafe’s Recipe Book for Folksy Novelists: one part dead-end town, just for passing through; equal parts young lovers, one hell-bent on leaving, the other rooting...
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
★★★★☆ British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh tells “Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery” in this aptly-titled memoir. He provides a personal trip through his career by relating stories tied to various medical problems. Each...
Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest edited by Bryan Hurt
★★★★☆ Watchlist explores what it means to be watched in a world in which our expectation of privacy is quickly becoming an outmoded concept. Who is watching whom? How we are affected by this...
The Art of Fiction by James Salter
★★★★☆ Celebrated in the American fiction canon for his precise, confident prose and stylized mid-century stillness, the late James Salter unquestionably deserves a book like the University of Virginia Press’s The Art of Fiction....
Signs of You by Emily France
★★★★★ Riley’s mother has been dead for two years when Riley spots her in a Heinen’s supermarket, nonchalantly perusing bubble bath as though she wasn’t even supposed to be six feet beneath the cold...
