Witherspoon’s take: “I was totally immersed in the fast-paced narrative that seamlessly wove together past and present. And all the beautiful details in this book are enough to pull at your heartstrings… every sentence is so vivid and luxurious you feel like you’re transported to a lakeside retreat in Cape Cod with a family you have known forever. I think you will love this one!” Read more
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President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen will release a joint book, Renegades: Born in the U.S.A., on October 26th globally via Higher Ground/Penguin Random House. Read more
In his latest, journalist and creative nonfiction professor Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream (1852-1892), “a doctor from Canada” and “a new kind of killer, choosing victims at random and killing without remorse.” Read more
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What initially looks like a collection of loosely linked short stories reveals itself to be an expertly constructed house of mirrors. Read more
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In this important work of biographical history, novelist Sohn traces the career of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), special agent to the U.S. Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. For more than 40 years, Comstock, a deeply Christian dry goods seller from Connecticut, harassed and imprisoned many of the important pioneers in the birth control movement. Read more
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Some books leave you wondering why the author has chosen to tell this particular story, and why now. This is emphatically not the case with “The Personal Librarian,” a novel about the woman who helped shape the Morgan Library’s spectacular collection of rare books and art more than a century ago. It quickly becomes clear why two popular authors, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, have teamed up to tell this important, inspirational story. Read more
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Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game. He’s not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights. He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten. Read more
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Prose ingeniously takes on publishing, the fallout of WWII, and McCarthyism in a gloriously astute, skewering, and hilarious bildungsroman. One of this bravura performance’s many piquant delights is Prose’s clever use of Simon’s fluency in ancient sagas as he struggles to comprehend just how malignant the scheme he’s bogged down in truly is. Mordant, incisive, and tenderhearted, Prose presents an intricately realized tale of a treacherous, democracy-threatening time of lies, demagoguery, and prejudice that is as wildly exhilarating as the Cyclone, Simon’s beloved Coney Island roller coaster. Read more
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Critics in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and elsewhere have praised the book. “Harris’ first novel is an aching chronicle of loss, cruelty, and love in the wake of community devastation,” said Booklist. Novelist Richard Russo, the author of “Marriage Story: An American Memoir,” said, “What a gifted, assured writer Nathan Harris is … better than any debut novel has a right to be.” Read more
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Anyone who reads this book will come away with a solid understanding of the dilemmas of free speech law. Readers with no legal training will gain a huge and valuable insight into the complexities of free speech law. This book ought to be required reading for all political leaders, especially those who persist in pandering to their base by intentionally misrepresenting why free speech is so important, even when we hate what the speaker has to say. Read more
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