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Stefan Merrill Block’s “The Storm at the Door”
Family dramas, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina* or We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oats, always intrigue me. I like the psychological aspect, the development of character, which culminates in how do...
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Last to the Party, and Loving It
As I mentioned on last week’s #fridayreads, I’ve begun, at the behest and be-gifting of a friend, to read Alan Bradley’s first installment of the Flavia de Luce series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of...
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Ben Marcus’“The Flame Alphabet”
Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet is an ambitious book. And it’s pretty okay. It’s got some things going for it and some things going against it. It says a lot while being economical—it checks in at a...
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Five Debuts to Watch
In a way, 2011 was the year of the debut: Chad Harbach, Karen Russell, Teju Cole, and Téa Obreht enchanted with first-time efforts. Though 2012 hasn’t offered any debuts on the literary level of Open...
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Karen Thompson Walker’s “The Age of Miracles”
In Karen Thompson Walker’s much-talked-about debut, The Age of Miracles, civilization is rocked by the news of a slowing in the earth’s rotation—”the slowing,” as it’s referred to in the novel—that...
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Kristen Iversen’s “Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of...
What do we love so much about that photograph of the V-J Day kiss in Times Square? Though it’s a celebratory moment of two people, which couldn’t possibly compare to the scale of what that day meant,...
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Jay Caspian Kang’s “The Dead Do Not Improve”
Squatting somewhere in this big old Internet of ours is something that John Warner—of The Funny Man fame—once wrote or said or was quoted as saying about writing. I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but...
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Our October Review Previewganza
As of today, September 29, we have reviewed forty-eight titles in 2012—not bad, right? This week we will publish titles 49 and 50. And yet, there’s more! So much more, really, to come as autumn turns...
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Ben Masters’s “Noughties”
There’s nothing remarkable about Oxford student Eliot Lamb. And that’s good. We’re not dealing with anyone remarkable here, nor do we really want to; Ben Masters has written a book that shows us our...
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Shani Boianjiu’s “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid”
It begins, it seems, at 23. You turn over to the back cover of the book you’re reading and find that the author is your age, or not much older. Sure, the world has its S.E. Hintons and similarly young...
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