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★☆☆☆☆ A story about an international high-stakes backgammon hustler should at least be exciting. Instead, Jonathan Lethem’s A Gambler’s Anatomy is a dud. Its hero, Alexander Bruno, is an indiscernible husk of machismo adrift...
★★★★★ The era of the Penny Dreadful in European literary history is one of vicious source material: many blood-curdling pamphlets of “true” crime were adulterated from the headlines, influenced by grizzly stories of psychopaths...
★★★★☆ Composed of nine discrete sections, each running around forty pages in length, David Szalay’s All That Man Is (shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize) is a series of character snapshots about aging...
★★★★☆ With a cascade of oddballs, theaters, dancers, confrontations, and concussions, iO Tillett Wright opens her tumultuous childhood to us. NYC in the 90s was a brutal place for the poor, and iO shows...
★★★★★ Set in the Ardennes region of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Roy Jacobsen’s fine novel Borders (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) is a multi-layered saga of philosophical geopolitics and...
★★★★☆ Teddy Wayne’s third novel Loner is a brave and precise portrait of a tense, prevalent subject. As with the opioid epidemic, sexual assault is undoubtedly widespread yet is too often hushed behind closed...
★★★★☆ “So here I am, upside down in a woman,” opens Ian McEwan’s surprisingly successful new novel Nutshell, which is narrated by the unborn child of a nine-months-pregnant woman. Readers may wince at this...
★★★★☆ In A Banquet of Consequences, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, of Scotland Yard, is at somewhat of a loss. Her best friend and his daughter have moved away from London to Pakistan. At work,...
★★★☆☆ No matter their background, at some point just about everyone partakes in heavy philosophical discussion on the nature of time. What is time? How does it work? Is it even real? Einstein’s relativity...
