Book Reviews Archive
The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert
Elisa Gabbert’s new essay collection is both an examination of conscience and a cataloging of modern American anxiety. It touches our pressure points with the intention of helping us identify sources of pain in our own lives.
Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition by Lisa Fishman
Lisa Fishman’s new collection is an honest and ongoing wrestling with the vocation of poetry itself.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg is a writer of wonderous understatement. Her stories end with readers feeling they have Wile E Coyote’d their way off a cliff and are only now realizing there is no ground left beneath them.
Must I Go by Yiyun Li
Though Yiyun Li’s new novel contains the sketchy architecture of an intergenerational, historical novel, its rooms and stories remain more conceptual than actual . . . . Husbands and wives are easily swapped. The defiant workings of memory are more important than memories themselves. Lives are annotated rather than
Pew by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey’s new novel questions what people are willing to do to protect their perceptions of peace. The answers may not be surprising, but when history is an endless horror show, why should we expect any different? What good is grace when people give it to themselves?
Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework
Atleework’s memoir is steeped in her passion for California’s Owens Valley and her striking observations. It reveals a life defined by an absence, and Atleework points us to the power in this understanding.
True Love by Sarah Gerard
Gerard’s novel is a fascinating read for anyone looking to understand the world we’ll inhabit when the smoke of the Trump era clears—in particular, the world that’s being left to young people.
Of Color by Jaswinder Bolina
Bolina’s collection explores the complicated ground of being “of color,” being an immigrant, being American, and being human with an admirable fluency. He entrusts us with an honest conversation—one that we should all be having with one other.
Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife
Ha is invested not in the myth itself but in what it helps us see. In her hands, the fairy-tale works as a photo filter, bringing into clearer relief her actual subject: the horrors of daily contemporary life.
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel forces us to see the inequities in the world, and the way desire for freedom is so often thwarted.