Best Books of 2018
This year, Run Spot Run has had the pleasure of reviewing ninety books ranging from high literature to historical nonfiction to comics and graphic novels. It’s an honor to share our opinions and help...
Category: Book Reviews
Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin
★★★★★ Welcome Home is one piece of a two-part follow-up to the celebrated posthumous 2015 publication of Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. Unlike the occasionally impressive but overreaching Evening in Paradise,...
Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz
★★★★★ “So, 007 is dead.” “Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.” The suit had kept its shape, M reflected. It was the man lying there, dripping wet and lifeless, who had lost his. Ian Fleming...
The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila
★★★★☆ Reading Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest is an experience of recognizing the ineffable: feelings of dread, paranoia, and angst adopt eerie and familiar forms in these twelve excellent stories. Dávila’s work echoes Nikolai Gogol...
The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima
★★★★☆ The Frolic of the Beasts is an overlooked melodrama by Yukio Mishima, one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of the twentieth century. Mishima was highly prolific and politically active throughout his life,...
Bunk by Kevin Young
★★★★☆ Kevin Young’s Bunk is an absolutely delightful, well-researched journey through the minefields of “Hoaxes, Humbugs, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.” From the public’s gullibility that made P.T. Barnum rich to Internet trolls,...
In the Hurricane’s Eye by Nathaniel Philbrick
★★★★★ The final installment in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Revolutionary War trilogy may be the strongest yet. First, Bunker Hill covered the opening salvoes of what came to be a protracted war of attrition. Then Valiant Ambition explored the...
The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
★★★☆☆ It’s fitting that Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection The End of the End of the Earth begins with a neurotic exploration of the essay format itself. Opening with this kind of self-doubt suggests that...
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin
★★★☆☆ In 2015, Lucia Berlin’s (1936-2004) posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women was a sensation. FSG presented her short stories as the work of an under-recognized master and readers reveled in her lost-in-time...
