Review by Brian Tanguay When Daiyu, the protagonist of Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, is abducted from the fish market, she’s a desperately hungry thirteen-year-old…
Category: Fresh Looks
The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right by David Roediger
Review by Brian Tanguay Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in America, made a statement in 2006 about class warfare which is often cited on the infrequent occasions when…
The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Review by Walter Cummins Although The Last Gift (2011) is not 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most acclaimed novel—the Booker Prize short-listed Paradise is—it illustrates his many strengths as…
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm
Review by David Starkey Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16, 2021, typically referred to herself as a journalist. While that’s certainly an honorable occupation—and working for The New Yorker,she…
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress by Mark Twain
A Fresh Look by Paul Willis Unlike many of my friends in Santa Barbara, I have never been to Europe. So, when I recently received an invitation to teach a…