God’s Ex-Girlfriend: A Memoir about Loving and Leaving the Evangelical Jesus by Gloria Beth Amodeo

IG Publishing By Walter Cummins The title, God’s Ex-Girlfriend, suggests a Dear John letter to explain why the author broke up with the Campus Crusade for Christ and its evangelical…

No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk by Gavin Butt

Duke Review by George Yatchisin Polymath producer-musician Brian Eno has this great theory about “scenius” as the corrective to “‘genius,’ which exemplifies what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of…

Democracy of Fire by Susan Cohen

Broadstone Review by Catherine Abbey Hodges In 2021, Susan Cohen’s poem “In Respect to the Jellyfish” won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize. The poem crossed my radar at that time, and…

Dust Child by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

(Algonquin) Review by Jinny Webber Published in March 2023, Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s Dust Child marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Americans pulling out of Viet Nam. Seeing and hearing…

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

(Random House) Review by Walter Cummins In his latest novel, ironically titled Victory City, Salman Rushdie appears to have pulled out all stops on his inventive powers as he dramatizes…

Foster by Claire Keegan

(Grove) Review by Walter Cummins While reading Claire Keegan’s impeccable novella, I couldn’t help thinking of the old saw about stray animals that wander into your yard: if you name…

Between Twilight by Connie Post

(New York Quarterly Books) Review by Linda Scheller Connie Post understands the price pain exacts on the body and psyche, and she writes about it exceptionally well. In Between Twilight,…

And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh

(St. Martin’s) Review by Walter Cummins The “finally” in Henry Marsh’s title refers to the clear signal that death awaits him. After seventy years of avoiding admission of that inevitability,…

Paul Newman and the Authorial Fallacy

Essay by Walter Cummins I’d always thought of Paul Newman as a pretty cool guy—handsome, talented as an actor, entrepreneurial supporter of the same causes I am, married to a…

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Review by Walter Cummins Like Rachel Aviv, the people whose mental issues she explores in Strangers to Ourselves are driven to write, some with works that…