The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
★★★★☆ Horror fiction legend H.P. Lovecraft transformed reality into mythos. His tales of the Old Gods, lurking “inside the earth or under the sea” or just beyond a distant astral plane, often begin in...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor
★★★★☆ Kanishk Tharoor’s impressive short stories conjure the ancient past and recall long-dead myths and legends. Tales of Iskander the Great’s world-conquering campaign are joined with stories of an elephant being escorted from Kerala...
The Futures by Anna Pitoniak
★★★☆☆ Anna Pitoniak’s debut novel The Futures is a quintessentially millennial coming of age story. A pair of undergraduates receive their diplomas, and as their graduation caps tumble to the grass, the scaffolding of...
The Face of Water by Sarah Ruden
★★★★☆ Water is capricious. Even when it seems still, it is ready to change, to appear and be different. Place a measuring device into a body of water and you have affected its flow....
How America Lost Its Secrets by Edward Jay Epstein
★★★☆☆ Many of Edward Snowden’s detractors contend that while his 2013 NSA surveillance revelations began with good intentions, he acted egotistically and in so doing compromised the efficiency of America’s counterterrorism operations. Author Edward...
The Lost Book of the Grail by Charlie Lovett
★★★★★ The existence of the Holy Grail may be the most enduring legend in Christendom. It first entered our permanent consciousness in an unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th Century....
The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★☆ Following his 2013 parable The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee returns to Simón, Davíd and Inés’s story in The Schooldays of Jesus (longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize) as they settle in the...
The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★☆ A compulsively readable contemporary fable, The Childhood of Jesus is an allegory about two immigrants, a boy and his guardian, and their difficulties acclimating to life in a new city. Davíd is a...
The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
★★★☆☆ It is a common enough image in painting: a nude woman descending stairs. In his new novel The Woman on the Stairs, Bernhard Schlink turns this single motif into a complete world with an...
