Knopf Review by Walter Cummins A significant pleasure of reading one of Julian Barnes many books is enjoying his verbal inventiveness and appreciating the workings of his mind. His deeper…
Category: Genres
When People Were Things: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and The Emancipation Proclamation by Lisa Waller Rogers
Barrel Cactus Press Review by Brian Tanguay Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in forty-one installments by the National Era, a prominent abolitionist newspaper. The story of a…
The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750 by Ingrid D. Rowland
MIT Press Review by David Starkey The Lies of the Artists is a clever title for a book with the subtitle Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750, but it seems to…
Railsong: A Novel by Rahul Bhattacharya
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Charulata Chitol is an unlikely heroine. The motherless daughter of a railway worker, Charu, as she’s known, lives with her father and brothers in India’s…
When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented Comedy by David Margolick
Schocken Review by Walter Cummins The hardest I’ve ever laughed took place more than fifty years ago. David Margolick’s book brought it all back in full hysterics, the experience of…
A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco Review by Walter Cummins When first reading A Long Game, I kept wondering who the book was written for. The title and the author would attract those of us…
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Europa Review by Walter Cummins This, Miller’s tenth novel, was a finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and received two major British awards for historical fiction. The story is historical…
Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom by Greta Lynn Uehling
Rowman & Littlefield Review by Brian Tanguay Because of the passage of time and the velocity at which events unfold, it’s understandable that Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea has fallen…
I Could Be Famous: Stories by Sydney Rende
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay The epigraph to Sydney Rende’s debut collection of short stories is a quote from Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should A Person Be? “How should a…
Transformed by India: A Life by Stephen P. Huyler
Pippa Rann Review by Brian Tanguay I was intrigued by Stephen P. Huyler’s description of his early travels, long before smartphones, GPS, language translation, and social media. Travel was more…