West Virginia Review by Walter Cummins My fine feathered friends. That phrase, dating back to the 1500s, occurred to me after I read Terese Svoboda’s novel Roxy and Coco. The…
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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…
End of Active Service: A Novel by Matt Young
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Dean Pusey is broken. By the Marine Corps and a tour of duty in Iraq. By the circumstances of his birth and adoption. By confusion…
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins We’ve all probably witnessed similar scenes afternoons when school is out, middle schoolers gathered in groups, all fixated on their smartphone screens and ignoring each…
Women! In! Peril!: stories by Jessie Ren Marshall
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay I can’t remember if I requested this collection of stories from the publisher or if it was just sent to me, but it arrived at…
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…
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Putnam Review by George Yatchisin Kiley Reid’s second novel Come and Get It might appear to be a campus-set comedy of manners, but the joke will be on you if…
Passport Photos by Amitava Kumar
California Review by Walter Cummins A tangle of borders dominates Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos. The most obvious are the boundaries between nations that require verification of a small booklet to…
American Spirits by Russell Banks
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins It may be me, but I find the three stories of Russell Banks’ posthumous American Spirits collection to be examples of gallows humor despite the…
Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino
Scribner Review by George Yatchisin If fathers and sons didn’t exist, novelists would have had to invent them. Alexander Sammartino, in his debut novel Last Acts, dishes up quite a…