The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada
★★★☆☆ Selva Almada’s debut novel The Wind That Lays Waste is set up as a carefully orchestrated morality play: when a reverend’s car breaks down, he and his daughter are forced to spend a...
Run Spot Run Book Reviews
The Pioneers by David McCullough
★★★★☆ The Northwest Ordinance passed Congress “without the least variation” on July 13, 1787. It created a territory that encompassed the eventual six states from Ohio and west around the Great Lakes to Wisconsin...
The Travelers by Regina Porter
★★★★☆ Regina Porter’s debut novel casts a big, wide, engrossing net of an intergenerational family saga. It starts in the 1950s and ends in the Obama era. It follows not one but two parallel...
Hark by Sam Lipsyte
★★★☆☆ Sam Lipsyte’s Hark plays like an inside joke that requires prerequisite familiarity with the author’s sensibility. There’s absolutely talent on the table here, an intriguing blend of the offbeat charm of George Saunders...
Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz
★★★★★ Tony Horwitz’s final book, Spying on the South, follows two “routes.” The first is a fascinating look at a young Frederick Law Olmstead, a mini biography if you will, as Horwitz follows his...
Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam
★★★☆☆ Without treading heavily in religious domain, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss depicts the classic story of never feeling satisfied despite having it all. The titular Chandra enters a late-life crisis, at the tail...
Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
★★★☆☆ Billionaire tech magnate Richard “Dodge” Forthrast dies while undergoing a medical procedure. His family learns that he has requested that his brain be cryogenically preserved, and when the technology becomes available, digitally uploaded....
Ship of Smoke and Steel by Django Wexler
★★★★☆ Ship of Smoke and Steel follows eighteen-year-old magic-wielder Isoka as she fights to save the lives of the handful of people she loves. She uses her magic, the power of Melos from the...
Odd Partners, edited by Anne Perry
★★★★☆ Never has murder and the telling of it been so delightful! In this new collection of short fiction, editor Anne Perry has brought together twenty established and rising stars of the literary murder...
