Mostly Dead Things is an odd creature: a book widely recommended and popularly listed, but marked by a fundamental discomfort that defies mainstream appeal.
“My trainer believes in me,” Remington Alabaster tells Serenata, his wife of 32 years. Until now he has been a reliable couch potato, she an equally predictable fitness maven.
Among the masterful short story writers of the 18th century in Russia—Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy—it is Anton Chekhov whose words are most known outside of the motherland because
“Even in the darkest sections, Ted O’Connell’s debut novel is upbeat, witty, and full of ideas about art, reality, truth, identity, fate, language, the rise of China on the world stage, Naz
Forty stories in 160 pages. Short: some one page, a couple, four to five pages. Short: but with a bang. Short: You will read in a flash and say, “What was that?”
“This may be the real gift of this book and its real magic, Susan Petrone’s moving us from indifference to understanding and caring for others and our world, and that’s a v
“Thammavongsa says vital things about the immigrant experience: how refugees strive to fit in and yet retain cultural traditions; how race is entwined with class; and how family is, in the
“Southern gothic novels such as Blackwood are not for the fainthearted, but for those who love symbolism, metaphor, and complex characters filled with angst and tortured self-refle
Julia Alvarez is a good storyteller, as anyone who has read her most well-known novels, In the Time of the Butterflies, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, knows.
“an engaging and fast-moving ride in the company of memorable characters, both good and bad, across a troubling social, cultural, historical and still timely landscape.”
“Meta-textual, self-reflexive, obscurely funny, and playful beyond easy articulation, it’s the perfect book for readers who delight in ‘the materiality of . . .
