Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year. Read more
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Category: Reviews
What’s Weird? These Novels — Brilliant Forays Into the Otherworldly
Having no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, I nonetheless love stories of the weird and inexplicable. Give me a plot involving magic, deals with the devil, three wishes, an impossible-seeming murder, time travel, alchemy, the Tarot, accursed books, revenants, demons or Elder Gods, and I’m a happy reader. In what follows, I race — with necessary but unseemly speed — through 10 recent volumes of the “weird,” nearly all from small independent presses. Read more
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The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022
“Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.” Read more
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Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave.
In his grouchy, funny memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more. Read more
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A Robot Wrote This Book Review
In “The Age of AI,” Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher explore how far artificial intelligence has come. Read more
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When the New York Times Book Review Panned the Classics
Some of today’s best-loved books — think “Catch-22,” “Tender Is the Night” and even “Anne of Green Gables” — had a rocky reception in our pages. Read more
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‘The Haunting of Alma Fielding’ Is a Ghost Story — and a Tale of Power and Fear
Summerscale’s writing is so inviting, the historical details folded into the narrative so well, that The Haunting of Alma Fielding reads like a novel you don’t want to put down. (The book design is also superb, the typeface somehow evoking something old and mysterious while also being easy on the eyes.) Best of all, it offers a variety of possibilities without definitively landing on one single answer; the book recognizes that, sometimes, the answer to the question “Was it real or was it fake?” is simply “Yes.” Read more
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A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames
…Ames delivers an old-school L.A. crime novel that evokes Chandler with maybe an aftertaste of Bukowski. Readers expecting action won’t be let down, and the sparkling yet unpretentious language gives the whole an extra kick. Recommend to noir fans, action fans, anyone who likes a good read. Read more
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