Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut

Columbia Review by David Starkey If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some…

Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker

Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins Before I attempt to say something about a book that theorizes life’s emergence from the perspective of the science of physics, I should admit that…

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 by Peter Schjeldahl

Abrams Review by Walter Cummins Peter Schjeldahl ends his essay “The Art of Dying”—written when he was well aware of his terminal lung cancer—with a recognition that “Dying is my…

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins It’s no surprise that Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a bestseller in the thriller & suspense and—not as obvious to me—literary fiction…

American Outrage: A Testamentary by H. L. Hix

BlazeVOX Review by Walter Cummins With every page of American Outrage—with every listing of the name of a person killed by gun violence, with every accumulating fact about guns in…

Soul, Ghost, My Absolute by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

Rain Mountain Review by Walter Cummins In her piece “The Foghorn,” Rosalind Palermo Stevenson includes several of her own translations of Antonin Artaud, including, “The dream is true. All dreams…

Small in Real Life by Kelly Sather

Pittsburgh Review by David Starkey When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of…

Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda

Liveright Review by David Starkey “Reading about how a succession of relatively small misjudgments and poor decisions can lead, with surprising speed, to human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale should,…

Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World by Edward Humes

Penguin Review by David Starkey In 2013’s Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, Edward Humes describes in detail the massive harm caused by America’s profligate production of trash. Garbology…

Byron’s Travels by Lord Byron, edited by Fiona Stafford

Everyman’s Library Review by David Starkey First of all, God bless Everyman’s Library. What other publisher lists among its new releases the novels and tales of Pushkin, the poetry of…