Book Reviews Archive
Review: DOG YEARS by Melissa Yancy
Melissa Yancy’s debut story collection, Dog Years, is an exploration into the intersection between our public and private selves. Each of the nine stories follows a central protagonist who is navigating the world, often uneasily and unsuccessfully, trying hard to figure out how to create a life with fewer
A Chapbook by Any Other Name: Reviews of 3 Prose Collections
Genre, in a post-Dylan-won-the-Nobel world, is worth considering on a variety of levels, and often when people hear “chapbook,” they assume automatically the speaker means a short collection of poetry. Publishers, though, also print chapbooks of prose.
Review: HERE I AM by Jonathan Safran Foer
Though it asks the questions, Here I Am is not here to answer inquiries, eschewing easy answers or clean endings. It may not be a manual for life, but it is a way of locating oneself in the world.
The Most Necessary Books for the End of 2016
This election season is no joke. At times, this world can feel grim as the weather grows cold and the nights grow long. Pick up one of these necessary books to guide you through the end of 2016 with heart, honesty, and compassion.
Review: GRIT: THE POWER OF PASSION AND PERSEVERANCE by Angela Duckworth
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Angela Duckworth Scribner, May 2016 354 pp, $28 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Aaron Sommers There’s a new teacher’s pet in class. It’s not the newest, most scientific standardized test to measure student achievement. It has nothing to do with
In Bookstores Near You: Boy Erased by Garrard Conley
Depicting his time as a “patient” in the ex-gay therapy program known as Love in Action (LIA), Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased opens in a way that reminds me, eerily, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Review: THE RETURN: FATHERS, SONS AND THE LAND IN BETWEEN by Hisham Matar
Through the detritus of the Qaddafi regime's collapse, Matar digs with a singular purpose: to return to his homeland and find any answers to the ultimate fate of his father.
3 Chapbook Reviews: Loving and Living in Louisiana
Sometimes, place is an obvious theme or motif in a work, while other times it informs a work in a subtler but still necessary way.
Review: WILLY LOMAN’S RECKLESS DAUGHTER OR LIVING TRUTHFULLY UNDER IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES by Elizabeth Powell
In this fantastic collection what is evident from the get-go is that the speaker is most definitely a daughter. She is also a wife, a mother, a woman of the deep heart and spirit. Reckless? No. Or, yes, if the heart is a reckless landscape of emotive temperaments, shifts,
Review: A WOMAN OF PROPERTY by Robyn Schiff
A new kind of writing about motherhood may be emerging. Rachel Zucker's and Arielle Greenberg's Home/Birth, Brenda Shaughnessy's Our Andromeda, Eula Biss's On Immunity, and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, for example, are conscious in a contemporary way about new possibilities of childbearing and parenting, about choices and agency, yet