(Grove) Review by Walter Cummins While reading Claire Keegan’s impeccable novella, I couldn’t help thinking of the old saw about stray animals that wander into your yard: if you name…
Category: Genres
Between Twilight by Connie Post
(New York Quarterly Books) Review by Linda Scheller Connie Post understands the price pain exacts on the body and psyche, and she writes about it exceptionally well. In Between Twilight,…
Liberation Day by George Saunders
(Random House) Review by Brian Tanguay If you read Tenth of December or Lincoln in the Bardo, you know that George Saunders isn’t afraid to challenge readers and make them…
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
(Bloomsbury) Review by Brian Tanguay “False information need not be coherent to be effective, and the specters of vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are easy enough to conjure.” So…
And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
(St. Martin’s) Review by Walter Cummins The “finally” in Henry Marsh’s title refers to the clear signal that death awaits him. After seventy years of avoiding admission of that inevitability,…
Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake
(Abrams) Review by George Yatchisin What Marseilles is to the Mediterranean, New Orleans is to the Caribbean, a savory meeting place where countries and cultures, priests and pirates, hopeful and…
Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw
(Penguin Press) Review by Brian Tanguay In Personality and Power, historian Ian Kershaw poses and answers fundamental questions of historical analysis about twelve individuals who significantly impacted — for good…
Concrete Poetry: A 21st-century Anthology edited by Nancy Perloff
(Reaktion) Review by David Starkey Compare an accomplished short poem of several hundred characters—say Seamus Heaney’s “Wedding Day”—with just about any concrete poem of the same length, and you’ll quickly…
The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks
(Knopf) Review by Brian Tanguay The year is 1971. The place is Florida, south of Orlando. 81-year-old Harley Mann sits on the porch of the house he has lived alone…
Haven by Emma Donoghue
(Little, Brown and Company) Review by David Starkey The opening of Haven (the title’s similarity to “heaven” is hardly accidental) has the feel of a classic adventure story. A well-traveled,…