The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret’s memoir, The Seven Good Years, is worth reading more than once. Keret has written a perfectly balanced book, both thoughtful and funny. The book is organized by years, with several essays to...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
With The Wright Brothers, historian David McCullough has transformed one of the most important chapters of world history into a perfect and succinct volume that effortlessly captures the era’s commitment to their dreams. Borrowing...
roman a clef
A roman a clef is a novel that is based on real events and/or people. The term was coined in France in the 17th century by the writer Madeleine de Scudéry, who wrote about...
Love May Fail by Matthew Quick
The title of this “aching tale of love and redemption” as self-described in the narrative is taken from Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail.” May is the key here. Love...
The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance celebrates the philosophy of the ordinary: this short novella is as profane as it is mundane and exists in a comical realm somewhere between the two. The story...
The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin
Published as Pismovnik (“Letter Book”) in the original Russian, Mikhail Shishkin’s The Light and the Dark is a staggeringly ambitious epistolary novel about two lovers and their unwavering commitment to their union. Alexandra (known...
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
In Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, Rachel Caine, a zoologist specializing in wolves, is offered a job back in Northern England by a wealthy Earl. His Annerdale estate is near the village she grew...
A Slant of Light by Jeffrey Lent
A Slant of Light opens with a horrific double murder in the bucolic farming area of western New York near the border with Canada. The American Civil War has been over for a few...
Armada by Ernest Cline
Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One, was a kaleidoscopic smorgasbord of 1980s pop culture slammed into the virtual world of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that existed in Cline’s nightmarish, post-apocalyptic...
