Penguin Essay by Brian Tanguay I first read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie thirty years ago, but hadn’t thought about the book again (though in that time I have read…
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Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer
Rosetta Review by Walter Cummins Most of us tend to consider the Middle Ages and those who inhabited those distant centuries victims of an inferior world that we’re fortunate to…
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss
Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…
A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space by Peter Selgin
Regal House Review by Walter Cummins Peter Selgin’s Boy’s Guide is in many ways a deceptive novel. From its playful title and lively accounts of the adolescent hi-jinks of the…
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay No journalist that I’m aware of has chronicled the rise of the Christian right as assiduously and comprehensively as Katherine Stewart has. From her first…
Playground by Richard Powers
Norton Review by David Starkey In some ways, Richard Powers’ new novel Playground is a double bildungsroman, showing us the youth and early adulthood of Todd Kean—white, a native of…
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther
Gallery Books Review by George Yatchisin Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she…
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Martin Aitken
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Stories of alternative realities are especially popular today. When I was teaching in an MFA program, more and more young students were abandoning literary realism…
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Metropolitan Books Review by Brian Tanguay Of the many books Rashid Khalidi has written about Palestine, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is by far his most personal one. Khalidi…
Plastic by Scott Guild
Pantheon Review by George Yatchisin The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters…