My favorite reading experiences either teach me about something I didn’t know much about or shine a light on parts of our culture I am unfamiliar with. Part of the urgency of reading Junot Díaz, for example, is that the stories he tells are usually left on the margins if they get told at all. … More Living and Dying the Native American Life in America: There There, by Tommy Orange
I have a condition where I want to like Alan Hollinghurst’s writing more than I actually do. The Line of Beauty was fine, but my opinion of it was helped by a BBC adaptation that smoothed out a lot of the areas I found problematic in the book itself–namely that there was something inaccessible about it. … More A Gay Multigenerational Saga: The Sparsholt Affair, by Alan Hollinghurst
Warning: if you are not into novels as therapy, this is not the book for you. If authorial gimmicks are not your thing, this is not the book for you. Motherhood is 300 pages of highly performative therapy as a writer agonizes over whether or not to have children. Is this writer a stand-in for … More When Therapy Meets Novel: Motherhood, by Sheila Heti
If you know me at all, you know I’ve spent recent years railing against novels about white dudes who can’t get their shit together (examples here, here, and here). But the thing about hating a certain form of novel is that every once in a while someone does it spectacularly well and forces you to … More Sometimes Less Really is More: A Book Review of Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?” In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng makes great use of the town she grew up in, Shaker Heights. A meticulously planned suburban sprawl, Shaker Heights becomes a sort of stand-in for the way life tends … More What Makes a Mother? Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Only Story, posits that while many things happen to a person in their lifetime, at the end of the day there is only one story that matters. In the case of our narrator, Paul, his one story is about his first love, and he seeks to share that story with … More Is Love the Only Story Worth Telling?
I follow the Tournament of Books every year, and every year I have at least one great discovery from the contest. This year, that discovery was Fever Dream. A friend recommended it to me after it defeated the heavy favorite Lincoln in the Bardo in the contest’s opening round. It was described as hypnotic, haunting, and slightly … More Getting Lost in Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin: Book Review
Have you ever noticed how many novels are about white guys who can’t get their life in order? SO MANY. And I can’t deal with it anymore. … More I Can’t with All the Screw-Up White Dudes in Literature: The Nix, by Nathan Hill
It’s rare that a book makes me laugh out loud AND cry. The Heart’s Invisible Furies did both. … More Coming of Age (and Coming Out) in a Changing Ireland: The Heart’s Invisible Furies, by John Boyne
An actress struggles toward sobriety in this fictionalized version of Carrie Fisher’s own struggles with substance abuse, famously adapted into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. … More Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher: Book Review
