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★★★★☆ Can any book, especially one as succinct (befitting a poet) as this one, explain the myriad factors that spark the production of a poem? Regardless of the precipitating factors, the key element, according...
★★★☆☆ Compellingly anxious and paranoid, Anna Burns’ Milkman (winner of the 2018 Booker Prize) is a timely, rambling novel set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Burns’ narrator is a thoughtful eighteen-year-old woman with a...
★★★★☆ Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is one of few recent novels with something salient to portray about our current Trump era. Compare this to last year’s Gary Shteyngart novel Lake Success, which, while...
★★★★☆ Step aside for a moment, Easy Rawlings: there is a new gumshoe in town, and he is out to do the right thing even if it might involve doing the wrong thing. Joe...
★★☆☆☆ When it was first published in The New Yorker in December 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” went viral. Its buzz is well-deserved (although maybe not worth the subsequent seven-figure book deal): the story...
★★★★☆ Is The Age of Light worth a million bucks? If you follow the book business, it’s a question you’ll be asking yourself the minute you pick up author Whitney Scharer’s debut novel, which...
★★☆☆☆ Sub-titled “Stories From the Peatlands,” The Dark Stuff is far too textbook-like and not appealing enough for the casual reader. The facts are very nice but the writing does not resonate: it just...
★★★★★ Haruki Murakami may be the most important thing to have happened to contemporary Japanese literature in translation, but he’s also become one of the most important things for the genre to overcome. “Murakami-esque”...
★★★★☆ “I’m struggling to finish this PhD dissertation, so instead I’ll transmute it into a novel about a graduate student struggling badly to finish her PhD dissertation,” thought debut novelist Juliet Lapidos. (Possibly.) While...
