Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
★☆☆☆☆ Miracle Creek is a courtroom drama mystery that kicks off with several plot points whose red herring status is plainly obvious. After slogging through a false narrative stretched far longer than necessary, it’s...
Category: Book Reviews
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
★★☆☆☆ A shadowy novel about espionage and emotional fidelity, Berta Isla follows a woman’s unrelenting commitment to her husband and his secrets. Tomás Nevinson and Berta Isla were teenage sweethearts and set on maintaining...
Going Dutch by James Gregor
★★★★☆ Big city dating is quite the battlefield, and James Gregor’s Going Dutch is as current and insightful a portrait as one might find. At his worst, the story’s protagonist Richard treats social capital...
In Other Words by Christopher J. Moore
★★★★☆ The American language is a pastiche of borrowed words from across the world. We borrowed from British English, of course. Then words and phrases (“hunters’ moon,” for example) were appropriated from Native Americans...
The Expectations by Alexander Tilney
★★★☆☆ The Expectations by Alexander Tilney is an exploration of the difference between the main character’s hopes for his boarding school experience and the reality he encounters. At St. James boarding school, Ben wants...
28 Paradises by Patrick Modiano and Dominique Zehrfuss
★★★★☆ A few years ago, the David Zwirner gallery empire launched David Zwirner Books, a publishing imprint that would produce and distribute not only their exhibition catalogues but also the occasional book of archival...
Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn
★★★★★ As a creator and lover of story, I have always idolized Paul Simon, a man’s whose songs often have sweeping narratives crammed into four elegant lines. In addition to being musically brilliant, his...
A Course Called Scotland by Tom Coyne
★★★☆☆ Tom Coyne’s goal was to play “107 practice rounds,” the number of golf courses in Scotland, in 56 days in hopes of refining his game so that he could qualify for the Open....
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada
★★★☆☆ Selva Almada’s debut novel The Wind That Lays Waste is set up as a carefully orchestrated morality play: when a reverend’s car breaks down, he and his daughter are forced to spend a...
