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★★★☆☆ From Baltimore Punk clubs to the ruddy streets of pre-reunification East Berlin, All Tomorrow’s Parties follows Rob Spillman’s search for creative authenticity and inspiration in the music and literature around him. Having spent...
★★★★☆ In Valiant Ambition, Nathaniel Philbrick recounts America’s first Civil War, the American Revolution, through the stories of George Washington and one of his most brilliant generals, Benedict Arnold. Citizens of Great Britain, living...
★★★★☆ Mark Kurlansky writes about the basics of life. Topics have included salt, cod fish, frozen food, music, and baseball (Hank Greenberg). Detailed, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched, his latest is a history of paper...
★★★★☆ Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s sentences intimidate: they metastasize and topple across multiple pages at a time, a labyrinthine chain of clauses begging for the release of a full stop. In a folkloric novel like 1985’s...
★★★☆☆ I came to Geoff Dyer via Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, his 2003 collection of creative nonfiction in which Dyer recounts a decade of listlessness, wanderlust, and his...
★★★★☆ Miroslav Penkov’s whimsical debut novel Stork Mountain brings readers to the rural Bulgarian village of Klisura, where an unnamed American narrator has just arrived to live with his grandfather. Compounding the generational and...
★★★★★ Sunjeev Sahota proves that it is possible to craft a quietly political novel, one that tells an essential cultural story not by heavy-handed prose and manifesto-caliber rancor but by the creation of fine...
★★★★☆ “I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg.”- Thomas Wentworth Higginson Renowned British...
★★★★☆ Jim Harrison’s The Ancient Minstrel is a chaser to life’s intoxicated stumble. Despite almost being able to smell the alcohol vapors from Harrison’s pages, his prose acts as a neutralizer: in a time...
