Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, that classic saga of the American south, has been a beloved novel since it was first published. But is it inherently racist? … More Is Gone with the Wind Racist? A Pulitzer Prize Deep Dive
In Maggie O’Farrell’s sterling Hamnet, she seeks to fill in the blanks of history to tell a deeply human story. … More Life and Death in the Margins: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
Reviews of Esi Edugyan’s Man Booker finalists Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black–one of which I love and one which I struggled to get through. … More When You Just Can’t Get Behind a Book Everyone Else Loves: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
Eleanor Roosevelt’s relationship with Lorena Hickok has been a source of controversy since the days it was happening in real-time. Were they secret lovers? Merely close friends? The topic has been endlessly debated. White Houses assumes that they were lovers, which seems reasonable, and purports to tell the story of their relationship. And it does, but … More The Secret Love Life of Eleanor Roosevelt: White Houses, by Amy Bloom
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
What happens when a guilt-ridden surgeon meets a violent sociopath? Nothing good. This visceral Man Booker Prize finalist pits reason against base instinct aboard a whaling vessel in the 19th century. … More The North Water, by Ian McGuire: Book Review
“All must pay the debt of nature.” Annie Proulx’s work up to now has been many things, some of them seemingly contradictory: terse, blunt, sharp, distant, poignant, violent, humane, and more. With Barkskins she claims an entirely new term for her collection: sprawling. Clocking in at more than 700 pages, Barkskins begins with the stories of René … More Barkskins, by Annie Proulx: Book Review
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” At the risk of overstating things, All the Light We Cannot See is far and away the most sumptuous, beautiful, and heartfelt book I’ve read in a great while. This is a book to get swept away in. Werner Pfennig is … More Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
“A body can’t prosper if a person don’t know who they are.” The Good Lord Bird is devilish entertainment. It’s a heady ride through a tumultuous time in American history that somehow manages the mean trick of making you laugh even as it deals with heavyweight subject matter. Its unique perspective is largely thanks to … More Book Review: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
Back in 2009 Colum McCann set the literary world on fire with the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, a collection of stories centered around the day a man walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center. Using that true event, McCann elevated the ordinary lives of his characters to … More Book Review: Transatlantic, by Colum McCann
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