We help readers find great books.
★★☆☆☆ Sarah Selecky’s debut novel Radiant Shimmering Light is the kind of book that sounds intriguing when boiled down to its elevator pitch, yet stumbles extensively in its actual execution. It’s a story incapable...
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...
★★★★★ 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,...
★★★★★ “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...
★★★★☆ 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 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,...
★★★★☆ 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,...
★★★★★ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
