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…
Category: Fiction
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…
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…
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…
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…
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Sally Rooney’s central charterers in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, talk quite a bit, just about every time they interact, hashing and rehashing…
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Review by David Starkey I honestly don’t know how much I would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, if I hadn’t already been familiar with…
I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause
radiant press Review by Brian Tanguay The central event in Suzy Krause’s latest novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before, is the end of the world. Sometime just after Christmas…
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins Kate Atkinson’s title for her sixth Jackson Brodie detective novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook, offers a broad hint that she is about…
Ain’t No Grave by Mary Glickman
Open Road Review by Jinny Webber Based on an infamous episode from Georgia history as experienced by two childhood friends, Ain’t No Grave paints a unique picture of early twentieth…