At the start of Alison Stine’s first novel, Road Out of Winter, the protagonist, a young woman named Wylodine (known as Wil) leaves her rural home in Ohio and sets out for California.
“Accept that you might have conventional horizons. Stop asking for life to be a poem. Why is it so difficult to speak plainly without allusions to books, films, and art?”
What’s new and especially refreshing about Diane Cook’s new novel, The New Wilderness, are the finely drawn women characters, especially Bea and Agnes, refugees from “The City,” who are ca
Post-apocalyptic novels featuring orphaned teenage girl protagonists proliferate. They fill their own shelves in bookstores, and their adaptations feed film studios and crowd streaming services.
Sergio De La Pava’s Lost Empress begins with all the right things, interesting plot, smart dialogue, and punning wordplay but sadly, like a child’s letting go of an untied balloon, Los
An unfinished science fiction novel by Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz . . . sounds intriguing doesn’t it? Unfortunately the pitch is much stronger than the final product.
Margaret Atwood has the uncanny ability to create works of literature that read like topographical maps with big red arrows that announce, “You are here.” or at least, “By the time you read this yo
The Sierra is gone. Colorado is dead. Phoenix has burned. The sky is “bloodred with ash.” Cheese comes in jars and looks like DayGlo; pears are grimy, and blackberries are filled with dust.
“A deeply felt story of human survival; of friendship that endures and abides the twists of fate; and the ability to see beauty in the world as it is, no matter what degradation of the plan
