Love May Fail by Matthew Quick
The title of this “aching tale of love and redemption” as self-described in the narrative is taken from Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.” May is the key here. Love...
Category: Book Reviews
The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance celebrates the philosophy of the ordinary: this short novella is as profane as it is mundane and exists in a comical realm somewhere between the two. The story...
The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin
Published as Pismovnik (“Letter Book”) in the original Russian, Mikhail Shishkin’s The Light and the Dark is a staggeringly ambitious epistolary novel about two lovers and their unwavering commitment to their union. Alexandra (known...
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
In Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, Rachel Caine, a zoologist specializing in wolves, is offered a job back in Northern England by a wealthy Earl. His Annerdale estate is near the village she grew...
A Slant of Light by Jeffrey Lent
A Slant of Light opens with a horrific double murder in the bucolic farming area of western New York near the border with Canada. The American Civil War has been over for a few...
Armada by Ernest Cline
Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One, was a kaleidoscopic smorgasbord of 1980s pop culture slammed into the virtual world of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that existed in Cline’s nightmarish, post-apocalyptic...
The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present
Have you been waiting, counting the years in iPhone generations, for someone to come along and update Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s 1967 bestseller The Medium is the Massage for our frantic 21st century?...
Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow
Some novels start with a clichéd concept and turn it into something out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, in Girl in the Moonlight, Charles Dubow starts with a clichéd concept (a boy falls in love...
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Seveneves begins with a bang – literally. Neal Stephenson minces no words in the first sentence of his new novel: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” One minute the...
