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★★☆☆☆ Bonnie Nadzam’s Lions feels composed from the Whistle-Stop Cafe’s Recipe Book for Folksy Novelists: one part dead-end town, just for passing through; equal parts young lovers, one hell-bent on leaving, the other rooting...
★★★★☆ British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh tells “Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery” in this aptly-titled memoir. He provides a personal trip through his career by relating stories tied to various medical problems. Each...
★★★★☆ Watchlist explores what it means to be watched in a world in which our expectation of privacy is quickly becoming an outmoded concept. Who is watching whom? How we are affected by this...
★★★★☆ Celebrated in the American fiction canon for his precise, confident prose and stylized mid-century stillness, the late James Salter unquestionably deserves a book like the University of Virginia Press’s The Art of Fiction....
★★★★★ Riley’s mother has been dead for two years when Riley spots her in a Heinen’s supermarket, nonchalantly perusing bubble bath as though she wasn’t even supposed to be six feet beneath the cold...
★★★★★ “I, too, dislike it,” Ben Lerner writes in the opening of his essential essay The Hatred of Poetry, invoking the beginning of Marianne Moore’s short, four-line poem “Poetry.” Moore’s poem continues with a...
★★☆☆☆ It’s the year 2020, and the melting of the polar icecaps has finally caused incontrovertible damage. “All that fresh water is flooding the oceans, reducing salinity,” which in turn increases the potential for...
★★★★☆ Adam Phillips is notorious for a couple things. One is that he is a Freudian psychoanalyst, to which I can hear you navigating way already, but don’t do that. The other is that...
★★★★★ “Imagine me gone,” their father tells them. Alec and his older sister Celia are too young to understand the sadness and desperation in their father John’s request as he lays down on the...
