Category: Reviews

In her debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Marcom explored the traumatic aftermath of the Armenian genocide through the imagined thoughts and feelings of those left behind. Here, she pens a poetic reflection on deportation, immigration, and the abstract notion of home. The story follows Emilio, a young Guatemalan American college student who is…

Powers’s debut novel, The Yellow Birds, a National Book Award finalist, offered a poignant rumination on America’s reverence for patriotism but simultaneous amnesia regarding the lives of deployed soldiers in a story drawn from the author’s own experience as an Iraq War veteran. This second novel, set in Powers’s hometown of Richmond, VA, probes the…

In his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, Gessen penned a passing nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald with an autobiographical tale of three writers struggling to turn their literary ambitions into a lasting legacy. Similar themes from Gessen’s life emerge here, as the author ruminates on the complexities of his homeland from the…

Standing as silent witnesses to our interweaving genealogies, cyclical wars, and collapsing empires, trees contain our collective history in addition to our climate record. Here, the acclaimed Powers (Orfeo; The Time of Our Singing) employs literary dendrochronology to weave the stories of nine strangers connected through their collective action in preventing a forest from falling…

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human existence. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd…

Perhaps best known for the Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark, released here as Schindler’s List and later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, Australian novelist Keneally’s literary career spans six prolific decades and more than 30 novels. This book harkens back to both a theme in his first novel, The Place at Whitton, and to his…

From Britney Spears’s manufactured sex appeal to Jim Morrison’s toxic masculinity, NPR music critic Powers (Piece by Piece; Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America) explores the intersection between America’s musical landscape and its overwrought cultural views of sex. She opens with a meditation on the interplay between body and sound crystallized in New Orleans’ Congo…

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his unflinching and exhaustive ruminations on Istanbul in such books as Snow and My Name Is Red, Pamuk’s tenth novel is once again set in his beloved Turkey. The story follows Chem, a boy who finds both an employer and a father figure in Master Mahmut, a…

The Library of America series features a black-and-white photo of the author against a black background underscored by a patriotic ribbon and is as iconic as apple pie. It’s fitting that the cover of an anthology capturing the groundbreaking and rebellious nature of rock and roll defies this convention. Inspired by Phillip Lopate’s introduction to…

Authenticity, failure, art, and identity would be a succinct, thematic description of Lee’s oeuvre (e.g., The Collective). Of course, it wouldn’t summarize the depth of his work. Here, Lee introduces us to Yadin Park, a failed musician who refused to let a major record label erode the purity of his work and sense of self.…

In an article for the New York Times, Van Reet, a veteran of the First Calvary Division in Baghdad and recipient of a James Michener Fellowship, criticized the publishing phenomenon of the “War on Terror Kill Memoir,” exemplified by American Sniper and No Easy Day. Rather than complicate the intricacies of death and combat, argues…

The opening vignette detailing Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s initial encounter with Charles Manson sets the tone for McKeen’s (journalism, Boston Univ.; Mile Marker Zero, Too Old To Die Young) latest foray into narrative nonfiction. With equal appreciation for the pop music emanating from Southern California’s musicians in the 1960s, McKeen also illuminates the lascivious, drug-addicted,…

In his 2013 memoir, I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place, Norman reflected on his maturation through an ever-shifting array of residences, from Michigan to Canada. The one form of continuity in Norman’s life was the public library, providing the spark for his luminous literary career. His new novel pays homage to the endurance and…

With the release of his fifth story collection, Shepard (You Think That’s Bad; The Book of Aron) continues to weave interlacing narrative threads that imaginatively evoke time and place. Thematically, the ten stories in this collection illuminate both the comedy and the tragedy of humanity’s tethering to the vagaries of the universe. Whether it’s soldiers…

In the 17th century, René Descartes contended that merely doubting one’s own existence simultaneously proved that one existed: Cogito, ergo sum. In his newest and most provocative work to date, McEwan (Atonement; Amsterdam) stretches the philosopher’s dictum to its limits with a novel narrated from inside the womb. Trudy is the surrogate of the unborn…

How does the mind grapple with transition, change, loneliness, and deterioration? Alameddine’s (An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine) body of work is an extended meditation on this central question. Though set in a psychiatric clinic waiting room, the novel delves into the structural and temporal landscape of Jacob’s mind. The Yemen-born protagonist scavenges through the…

The fragmented images of tortured prisoners from Abu Ghraib and the U.S. military’s tactic of “shock and awe” are what many remember from the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Scranton (Learning To Die in the Anthropocene; Fire and Forget) experienced these events firsthand during his 14-month deployment in Iraq with the U.S. Army. Here, in his…

Underscoring the importance of place in fiction, Eudora Welty once wrote, “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” For Morgan (All the Living), Kentucky is the place; she’s a longtime resident and an alumna of Berea College. Here, Henry Forge, the heir to a legacy estate in the state, dedicates both his fortune…

Language is paramount in Cohen’s work. His last novel, Witz, was a linguistically dexterous work spanning more than 800 pages. Two-page sentences spiked with shards of scattered verses invited the reader into the deep psyche of his characters. Here, the author pens a syntactically enticing narrative of technology. The main character, Joshua Cohen, is an…

In Doctorow’s The March, readers are led into the mind of Union army general William Tecumseh Sherman as his troops burn their way through the Carolinas, leaving a wake of physical and psychological destruction. Here, the story master delivers the confined thoughts of Andrew, a troubled cognitive scientist, whose conversation with an unknown questioner details…

Considered one of the greatest country songs of all time, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” would become George Jones’s (1931–2013) signature song and come to encapsulate his persona: a deeply tragic figure with a love and exuberance for life. Kienzle (Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz) tells the story of this…

In his debut novel, High Cotton, Pinckney created a narrator who resists the reductive racial identity thrust upon him by society and embarks on a journey to define his individualism against and within the historical truth of his family, race, and upbringing. Similar themes run through this novel, as we follow Jed Goodfinch, a recently…

A nice review of Focus on Educating for Sustainability: Toolkit for Academic Libraries over at Hack Library School.