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★★★☆☆ Translated from the Arabic, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad updates a classic from the literary canon into a devastating, modern-day political allegory. In an attempt to give a rightful burial to the countless...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The wind blows, the ground shakes, and your home remains standing whether it is stick-built or a skyscraper of steel and concrete. There are specific reasons why this is...
★★☆☆☆ After graduating high school, Finley leaves her mom in NYC to visit her dad in Maine for the summer. But as Cristina Moracho shows in A Good Idea, everything has changed since Finley’s...
★★★☆☆ When James Salter died in 2015, he left behind some of the best American novels of the twentieth century. His 1957 debut, The Hunters, is a harrowing story of the Korean War built...
★★☆☆☆ Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, set at a quiet New England town, is a fairly derivative work that fails to rise above long-established industry plot scaffolding. Its writing style isn’t completely stale,...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ All literature is the product of its history, possessing dormant traits of the author’s precursors and contemporaries. Whether inspired or incited by these sources, stories emerge from stories, and...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Reminders of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House underpin the opening of Margery Allingham’s small and wonderful 1929 mystery novel The Crime at Black Dudley: “The view...
★★★★☆ What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? These are the questions that Erling Kagge explores in Silence in the Age of Noise, recently translated...
★★★★☆ In 2012, Will Self published Umbrella, an under-read masterwork of Joycean proportions that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Umbrella reads as if Self found a loose thread in the conceptual stitching of...
