The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
★★★★☆ Picture a glass globe, hollowed out. Is it empty, or paradoxically, is it filled with a void? Like the questionable audibility of a falling tree in a distant forest, it’s a conundrum that...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
★★★★☆ Ted Chiang’s second collection of stories, Exhalation, reads like curious thought experiments in narrative form. The stories are science-heavy (unique concepts like blue shift, multiverse theory, and entropy inform each plot), and Chiang’s...
China Dream by Ma Jian
★★★★☆ Chinese dissident author Ma Jian’s latest novel is a scathing satire panning Xi Jinping, but it will be tough for people living under Xi’s regime to get a copy of the book. Ma’s...
Outside Looking In by T.C. Boyle
★★★★☆ We’ve all occasionally fantasized about penetrating some ultimate inner circle, being born into the right era and the right place so that any possible “fear of missing out” is a distant nonentity. T.C....
The Fifth Sense by Erik Nickerson
★★★☆☆ The Fifth Sense by Erik Nickerson is the story of a girl raised in a society that believes the eyes are vestigial organs that only confuse people, yet Apple Peterson is curious. When...
Lanny by Max Porter
★★★★☆ A controlled, experimental novel about local folklore and the way we communicate, Max Porter’s Lanny is an impressive follow-up to his highly-acclaimed 2016 debut Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Set in a...
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
★★★★☆ The cover of The City in the Middle of the Night boasts a blurb by Pulitzer-winner Andrew Sean Greer, calling its author Charlie Jane Anders “this generation’s Le Guin.” For those uninitiated with...
Orange World by Karen Russell
★★★★☆ For a long time, it felt like there was no place for magic in contemporary literature. Ghosts, spirits, and devils were a thing for comics and chunky TOR paperbacks; highbrow fiction didn’t deal...
The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths
★★★★☆ It is February 2016, a leap year, and Valentine’s Day nears. An ominous letter comes to DCI Harry Nelson; it seems to be from a long-dead murderer involved in a twenty-year old case...
