Book Reviews

[ad_1] David Goodwillie leans heavily on nostalgic sentimentality to carry his literary mystery novel, Kings County, but the suspense-driven plot flounders as the characters bounce between the highlights of a has-been tour of scenester Brooklyn. Set mainly in north Brooklyn, the epicenter of hipster culture, the novel unfolds during a period of rapid gentrification overlaid … Read more

[ad_1] I first met Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in a record store in Charleston, WV. We were part of a reading set up by the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue. The event was fun—great writing from old and new friends alike—and then Ashleigh took the stage. She unlocked her phone and birdsongs sang from the speakers above. She … Read more

[ad_1] Cherie Dimaline is a writer of indigenous stories. Her newest novel, Empire of Wild, focuses on a community of displaced Métis descendants who ended up in Arcand, Canada, determined to make a living. Joan and her tight-knit (though sometimes-smothering) family survive as best they can with a construction business, building on land slowly being … Read more

[ad_1] Many parents raise their children emphasizing the “goodness” and “badness” of everything from food to language to sex. The good-versus-bad mindset can easily foster adolescent periods wrought with secrecy and confusion, distrust and resentment. Certain baby boomers especially love that kind of thing. Sara Faith Alterman details in her memoir, Let’s Never Talk about … Read more

[ad_1] Over the past few months, most of us have felt our plans for the future slip out of reach. Perhaps, like me, you too have been gripped by anxiety over what the future holds. This sense of uncertainty underpins everything in Life Events, the latest book from Karolina Waclawiak. The book follows Evelyn, a … Read more

[ad_1] Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue’s new novel, The Pull of The Stars, is destined to be a hit not just because of Donoghue’s characteristically stellar storytelling, as evidenced in previous bestsellers like Room (2010) and The Wonder (2016), but also because of its astonishingly prescient subject matter: the novel is about the 1918 Great Flu … Read more

[ad_1] Lindsay Ellis’s new book, Axiom’s End, is an ambitious work of science fiction. Not content to take the route of alternate history, or tell an action-packed “First Contact” tale, Ellis centers her story on the human and inhuman. The driving question of the novel is how we make sense of what we don’t understand. … Read more

[ad_1] The narrator of Catherine Lacey’s new novel Pew often sleeps in churches, not because they are in search of “grace or deliverance,” but because “a church is also a building, often a sturdy building, and it can keep the outside far from you and when the outside is far enough from you, that is … Read more

[ad_1] This month I had the pleasure of speaking with Susan Barba, a poet and senior editor at New York Review Books. Her latest collection, geode, is a gorgeous meditation on humanity’s relation to the earth in a time of climate change. In our interview, we discuss what inspired the collection, her thoughts on what poetry … Read more

[ad_1] In a 2017 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Sarah Gerard was asked a question about what she was reading. “I’m interested right now in reading a lot about love. Love, desire, sex. […] I’m thinking a lot about sex and love from a political standpoint too,” she said. “I’m also looking very skeptically at … Read more