Helping readers find great books.
★★★★☆ Everyone’s a critic, and for good reason. That’s A.O. Scott’s declaration in Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, in which Scott dissects the nature of criticism, digging...
★★★★☆ Maben and her daughter Annalee walk along a lonely highway, a black garbage bag of clothes their only possession. Three days of “walking to nowhere with nothing” have rendered them dead tired, nearly...
★★☆☆☆ As inner city crime, police brutality, terrorism and invasive surveillance continue to permeate the news, potential roads toward societal harmony grow elusive. Is such a goal an idealistic holy grail, or could an...
★★★★☆ With Marvel reinventing Norse gods like Thor and Loki for the screen, it seems appropriate that someone should come along to breathe new life into the stories of these and the other Scandinavian...
★★★★★ Bill Hayes left San Francisco desolate after the death of his partner, Steve. He bought a one-way ticket to New York and rented an apartment. He recalls observing five ailanthus trees from his...
★★★★☆ Harrowing and brutal, Han Kang’s Human Acts is exactly the sort of political novel the world needs in 2017. While her story is specific to a single historical moment, Kang’s account of a...
★★★★★ Anders Rydell illustrates the myriad ways in which the Nazis made book disappear: they were stolen, burned, or locked away in their private libraries to be studied in order to turn their truths...
★★☆☆☆ A Bangladore family in the spice trade is faced with a crisis of interdependence. The narrator’s uncle managed to transform their family into wealthy entrepreneurs (doing so practically overnight), and each member of...
★★★★☆ This splendid collection of short stories could not have appeared at a more appropriate time. Immigrants and refugees are under attack from the highest levels of government to the lowest level of individual...
