The book has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring. Read more
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On Petri’s deranged timeline, John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. Nearly eighty short, hilarious pieces span centuries of American history and culture. Ayn Rand rewrites The Little Engine That Could. Nikola Tesla’s friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon. The characters from Sesame Street invade Normandy. And Mark Twain–who famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated–offers a detailed account of his undeath, in which he becomes a zombie. Read more
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…upon its publication in 1989, Garden of Seven Twilights was hailed as a masterpiece and showered with accolades—the Serra d’Or Critics prize, the National Prize for Catalan Literature, and many others. Critics blessed Palol with comparisons to Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Perec, dubbing his work “the postmodern Decameron.” Garden especially earns this last epithet—it is a frame-narrative monolith, a monstrously pregnant matryoshka doll of nested stories, and a cerebral, ludic, and unapologetically pulpy affair. Read more
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Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind. Read more
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Link has a boundless imagination and a sharp sense of humor, but even in tales filled with vampires, monsters, and a menagerie of talking animals, she never forgets the humanity of her characters, even when she puts them through their paces. She’s no sentimentalist, to be sure, but she writes with a seemingly limitless compassion, which anchors the stories in something enduring, something more real than real. Read more
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In “Spoken Word: A Cultural History,” Joshua Bennett traces the roots, rise and influence of a movement that continues to reverberate. Read more
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How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it? Read more
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This engrossing novel by the author of “The Great Believers” is many different books at once. It is a boarding school novel, offering an encapsulated view of a world within a world. It is a cold-case mystery in which readers learn new information along with the characters. It is an adult-revisiting-childhood story in which a narrator considers the past from a different viewpoint. It is also a perceptive commentary on contemporary society. These elements come together seamlessly in a fast-paced mystery. Read more
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Mariana Enriquez’s novel, her first published in English, uses otherworldly elements to consider Argentina’s violent history. Read more
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This is an absolutely fascinating and deeply troubling book. Rage-inducing and heartbreaking, it’s a rigorously researched, energetically written examination of a phenomenon laughed off for too long as fringe silliness. QAnon, Sommer suggests, is no mere conspiracy theory, nor is it simply a cult of Donald Trump worshippers. It is, in a very real sense, a part of the Trumpist Republican mechanism, a dangerous force that influences political ideology and social change—a force that cannot and should not be ignored. Read more
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