Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents follows a wide cast of characters through Hollywood and WWII. But does he do too much? … More Hollywood, Corruption, and the World: Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
“History is the error we are forever correcting.” The Tsar of Love and Techno is a series of interlocked stories spanning generations in Russia, Siberia, and Chechnya. It starts with a bang, telling stories of a Soviet censor who paints his brother, who was executed and whose existence was wiped out by the government, into … More The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra: 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
“We are part of a long tradition of suffering.” Books about war–and particularly short story collections about war–always suffer in my mind because they inevitably get compared to what I believe is the greatest war collection of all time: The Things They Carried. It is to Phil Klay’s enormous credit that much of Redeployment stands ground with … More Book Review: Redeployment, by Phil Klay
Lilian Shang has been haunted by her father for many years. A Map of Betrayal is both of their stories, and in typical style for Ha Jin, it’s an elegant, restrained exploration of family, loyalty, and patriotism. Lilian’s father Gary immigrated to the US as a translator with the CIA, where he earned a stellar … More Book Review: A Map of Betrayal, by Ha Jin
“And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another … But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.” Following up a great first novel is no easy task, and many writers fall victim to the so-called “sophomore slump”. Not Khaled … More Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
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