The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses
★★☆☆☆ Feverish, recursive thoughts and a lachrymose prose are the key features of The Hundred Year Flood, a debut novel ten years in the making. It focuses on Tee, a half-Korean boy who, after...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
The Blue Guitar by John Banville
★★★★★ John Banville is an astonishing wordsmith and delivers with The Blue Guitar a rhapsodic novel from the upper echelons of contemporary literature. His sentences are for savoring: ambrosiac chains of clauses so good...
Best New Books to Read: September 2015 Releases
Purity by Jonathan Franzen Millennial malaise, digital over saturation, masculinity and contemporary feminism are on the menu in Jonathan Franzen’s new sweeping epic starring a mid-twenties college graduate named Pip “Purity” Tyler. (FSG, September...
Writing Across the Landscape by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
★★★★☆ Writing Across the Landscape is a bountiful book covering the travels of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from 1960 until 2010, more than half the life of this remarkable 96-year old man. Time, as one can...
The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan
★★★☆☆ Former photographer Anne Quirk is fading away. She suffers from the early phases of dementia and her family and the neighbors in her assisted living co-op must accept that she’s in need of...
Purity by Jonathan Franzen
★★☆☆☆ Jonathan Franzen, author of the divisive and monumental novels Freedom and The Corrections carries with him an aura of literary importance. Since the publication of The Corrections nearly fifteen years ago, his books...
The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
★★★★☆ Alice Hoffman is the author of 25 adult novels and a handful of young adult and children’s books. Her voluminous body work is sometimes critiqued as being uneven, but a reader beginning with...
A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball
★★★★☆ It is better to consider Jesse Ball a text-based artist than simply a novelist: his books are far from traditionally fulfilling narratives but instead captivating volumes of expressive, theoretical exploration. Dialogue-driven, A Cure...
Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of An American Cannibal by Harold Schechter
★★★☆☆ Speak of cannibalism in America and two names come to mind: the Donner Party and Alfred Packer. History has proven that, except for starvation and eating the dead, nothing untoward happened to the...
