(milkweed editions) Essay by Brian Tanguay This June and July were two of the hottest months ever recorded. Wildfires in Canada blanketed a swath of the United States in choking…
Author: Brian Tanguay
An Interview with John Holman
John Holman is the author of two memoirs, Pom’s Odyssey and A Horse in My Suitcase (see the In Brief review that follows the interview), which chronicle his boyhood on…
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond
(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay What Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is to racial inequality in the criminal justice system in America,…
Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams
Crown Review by Brian Tanguay One anecdote in Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You captures the essence of Lucinda Williams, the acclaimed American singer/songwriter. In 1993, Williams won…
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Morrow Review by Brian Tanguay I can’t remember reading a work of fiction where bits of prose took me out of the story as often as happened while reading Yellowface…
True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield
(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay There are many ways to describe Sam Shepard, but the one word that immediately comes to mind for me is protean. Playwright. Actor. Director. Screenwriter.…
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph
(Basic Books) Review by Brian Tanguay Like many Americans, I saw the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a long awaited turning point in race relations in this country.…
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
Riverhead Books Essay by Brian Tanguay This past February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the armed standoff between the US Marshall Service, FBI, and members of the American Indian Movement…
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell
(Penguin) Review by Brian Tanguay Discovering a new author is one of the unparalleled joys of reading. Like the box of chocolates made famous by Forrest Gump, one never knows…
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
(Harper Perennial) Review by Brian Tanguay I’m not sure why it took me so long to read Louise Erdrich. I’ve seen her name on lists of best books in literary…