Book Reviews

[ad_1] At some point during my maiden reading of The Snow Collectors, I felt compelled to turn to the person sitting beside me and explain the book’s plot. This person—a friend who is by no means coy about taunting me for what she might deem my “less accessible” taste in novels—arched an eyebrow and said … Read more

[ad_1] With The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, Chicago-based novelist Michael Zapata delivers a globe-trotting and generation-spanning debut that expands the notion of home and the meaning of storytelling. In the early twentieth century, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau publishes Lost City, a work of science fiction that inspires a dedicated fandom that transcends … Read more

[ad_1] American news junkies, preoccupied as they have been with domestic affairs, may only vaguely remember a story that made international headlines in the summer of 2016: Qandeel Baloch, nicknamed the “Kim Kardashian of Pakistan,” was murdered. Her brother openly admitted to strangling her, because she had dishonored the family name with her provocative videos … Read more

[ad_1] From her home in California last month, Lidia Yuknavitch told me she was having an unusually good day: “I think the world is going to shit right now, but inside my house it was good, so I just gave myself one day to feel okay.” I told her that she had answered at least … Read more

[ad_1] Maria Kuznetsova’s novel Oksana, Behave! follows the fierce, and fiercely funny, misadventures of Oksana, a character whose every act of aggression and defiance proves how very full of love she is. The book begins with seven-year-old Oksana newly arrived in Florida from the Soviet Union. Called a “baby Bolshevik” by a teacher (after Oksana … Read more

[ad_1] The winter drags on, but that’s fine with us: The cold gives us an excuse to stay in and read, read, read! February brings a bevy of incredible novels, poetry collections, and works of non-fiction that we can’t wait to crack open by a crackling fire (or, more likely, a heated radiator–that’s city living … Read more

[ad_1] Death is a blank stare. It’s an enigma for the living. While we try to interpret the concept of death, we’ll never really know it until we experience it for ourselves. What we do know about death is the feeling of loss, the disruption of daily rhythms, companionship, and love. It’s difficult. Grief is … Read more

[ad_1] My phone number still has an Iowa area code, even though I haven’t lived there for over a decade. That means every four to eight years I’m inundated with calls and texts from Democratic presidential hopefuls, or at least their hard-working canvassers, asking for my support at the caucuses. I’ve only participated in one, … Read more

[ad_1] At the beginning of his latest collection of poetry, Survival Is A Style, Christian Wiman lays out the territory that serves as the setting for his verse, a less-than-concrete fabric he deftly fingers throughout: “I need a space for unbelief to breathe.”  This God-spaced hole hangs heavily over Wiman’s oeuvre. In this new collection, … Read more

[ad_1] Tola Rotimi Abraham’s first novel is a story of tragedy. It is not supposed to be hopeful. But there is hope in the telling. Black Sunday is told through a scattering of episodes that center around the lives of four siblings in Lagos–twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike, and their brothers, Andrew and Peter. Their … Read more