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Hot Reads: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, The Last Girlfriend of Earth,...
This week’s Hot Reads are all about looking for love — on stage, through a collapsed marriage, under the threat of nuclear destruction and even in the Gowanus Canal. The full reviews are here.
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Hot Reads: Middle Men, A Week in Winter, An Armenian Sketchbook, The...
Featuring a John Wayne western, teleportation experiments, indigestion in Armenia, and the highways of Los Angeles. The full reviews here.
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Math Anxiety and a Visit to MoMath
In fifth grade, four of my classmates and I tested out of elementary school math. Instead of one more year of long division, every day during recess we marched ourselves across the muddy field...
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Hot Reads: The New Mind of the South, Honor, Between Man and Beast, A Tale...
This week’s Hot Reads feature Japanese tsunami flotsam, “the ‘two-ness’ of Southerners,” an honor killing in 1970s London, and gorillas.
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Revenge
Head over to Words Without Borders for my review of Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: If an enterprising reader were to map the through-lines linking the quiet, twisted (and subtly interconnected) tales of...
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Hot Reads: Kings of the Road, Equilateral, The Pink Hotel, My Bright Abyss
This week’s Hot Reads feature a pink hotel, a red planet, a bright abyss, and a giant burning triangle. Also, men in very short shorts. Splendid books all around. Visit The Daily Beast for the full...
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How to Create the Perfect Wife
Thomas Day was wealthy and educated and ran in influential circles. But there was one problem. The 18th-century British philosopher’s lack of interest in polite manners and fashion—and, more...
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Hot Reads: Snapper, The Humanity Project, Red Spectres, My Animals and Other...
From a lovestruck bird-chasing ecologist to the forgotten Gothic literature of 20th cent Russia: This week’s reviews are up. Read more at Newsweek / The Daily Beast.
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The Critic’s Global Voice
With more than 100 world-class writers in dozens events spanning a week, this year’s PEN World Voices Festival line-up is pretty daunting. I did manage to carve out time to make it out for a few...
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Hot Reads: On Sal Mal Lane, The Watch Tower, Fools
Check out my reviews of Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane, The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower and Fools by Joan Silber at The Daily Beast.
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Hot Reads: In the Woods Upon the Dirt, The Girl Who Loved Camellias,...
The latest batch! Riches and ruin on Wall Street and 19th century Paris, plus a vengeful bear, a bookish cab-driver, and more in Newsweek / The Daily Beast.
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A Fort of Nine Towers
I reviewed A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar in today’s New York Times Book Review. A snippet: The collective memory of prewar life repeatedly saves Omar and his family. The bloodthirsty...
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Hot Reads: Lost Girls, Memories of a Marriage, The Madonna on the Moon, The...
Summer: such a blur. Here’s the most recent set of Hot Reads! If you read just one of these books, let it be Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls. It was hard to do it justice in less than 300 words.
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Happiness, Like Water
I reviewed Chinelo Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water for The Daily Beast: Scheming mothers and selfish husbands, fathers, and brothers domineer over the sensitive women of Happiness, Like Water,...
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Hot Reads: The Pomegranate Lady and Her Son, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, You...
Hot Reads! I took a little break from reviewing in September/October to get married. It was grand. This is the first post-wedding set of reviews. Goli Taraghi’s The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons was...
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2013 is Officially the Year of the Selfie
In early October, The Takeaway explored the possibility of doing a story about The National #Selfie Portrait Gallery. Suspecting that our host would be more than a bit skeptical about the premise of...
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Hot Reads: The Stories of Frederick Busch, The Explorer Gene
This week I reviewed The Explorer Gene and The Stories of Frederick Busch over at The Daily Beast.
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Books of 2013: My Favorites
I “get” list fatigue—sometimes, around this time of year, lists feel too neat, too easy, too predictable. This is especially true of lists of books. As independent publishing house Two Dollar Radio...
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Hot Reads: Tomorrow-Land, Leaving the Sea, A Highly Unlikely Scenario
A new year, new books! This week’s picks feature the cities of Cleveland and Dusseldorf, Pythagorean Pizza, and a whole lot of Robert Moses: A little more than a week before the 1964-65 World’s Fair...
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A Literary Walkabout in Gary Shteyngart’s Queens
In the brief interval between Polar Vortex I and Polar Vortex II, I somehow I managed to get in a leisurely amble through Queens with Gary Shteyngart. We met at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens...
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