By Jonah Hall
Absorbing Kim Adrian’s The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet.
All in Book Reviews
Crumbling Worlds
By Timothy Day
The outer and inner horrors of Brian Evenson’s stories.
We Were Tired of Being Mild
By Joshua James Amberson
Post-punk poet Lydia Tomkiw’s collected poems.
Voices That Filled the Years
By Joshua James Amberson
Catherine Lacey’s “Pew” listens to the American South.
Reading for Pleasure for Search Engines
By Matthew Hein
Trying to Get Back into Reading Books? Secret tips and how-to hints from an expert.
Whitman, Illuminated
By Wendy Bourgeois
On an edition primarily interested in the more spiritual, less embodied aspects of Whitman.
Stylist at the Bar
By Alan Limnis
Bernard DeVoto won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but more importantly, he knew how to write about liquor.
To Be Human and Get Away With It
By Rachel Greben
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is built as a fairy tale: the daughter, Sofia Scicolone, journeys far from home to achieve her calling as Sophia Loren, but the road home is treacherous.
Venus in Rain
By Lisa Sibbett
Among all the woodenly significant short stories I was asked to read in junior high and high school, a few stand out as authentically awesome, non-wooden exceptions: a Donald Justice poem here, an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five there, and Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day,” which, oh my God.
Calling God Into Account
By Emily Burns Morgan
Gay and black and writing in the 1950s, Baldwin had plenty to be angry about. One could hardly blame him for sliding into moralizing. But, in the fiction, he does not.
No Impeccable Self to Reach
By Catherine Johnson
In The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang challenges readers not only to participate in recreating how our culture treats and understands mental illness, but to explore some of our most basic assumptions about identity and suffering.
The Tripods
By Rachel Greben
Science fiction at its best presents a heightened state of human possibility and peril, and reading it as a child provided architecture for my soul, along with a promise that growing up would be harrowing and fraught with danger.
Homunculi of the Mind
By Lucas Bernhardt
When Paul Linebarger wasn’t busy practicing psychological warfare, he wrote fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith—much of it set in a far, far future he may or may not have believed he’d visited.
Bud
By Matthew Hein
Bud Harrelson’s Mets kept showing up.
Circles Don’t Have Sides
By Pete Tothero
Circles don’t have sides, and Michael Lind’s review of Jill Lepore’s This America is beyond the pale.
“I’m Obviously Quite Unpleasant”
By Jennifer Ruth
The four interviews collected here have appeared before, but read together they deliver a strong impression of the who of Arendt. We know the what already. At least we think we do.
Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes His Way into American History
By Dan DeWeese
Among all of the cable television arguments, newspaper columns, social media memes, and political soundbites that attempt to supply explanations for how American culture has arrived at the place it is, We Were Eight Years in Power is what future readers will most likely look back on as the best entry in the new genre of How We Got Here.
Two Thousand, Five Hundred and Two Books to Read or Die Trying
By Matthew Hein
Those who harbor guilt over incomplete assignments from their formal educations—Frankenstein, Our Mutual Friend, Dante’s Paradiso—hardly need new assignments. But Mustich’s book, pleasingly designed by Janet Vicario, offers something special: pretty pictures. They’re well-chosen: sexy author portraits, cool first-edition covers, and pages of hand-corrected drafts.
Beyond Fixed Boundaries
By Catherine Johnson
Inheritance is less about what we inherit genetically and more about how stories of family lineage not only shape notions of identity and what it means to know oneself, but the stability of that identity and knowledge.
A Symphony of Voices
By Catherine Johnson
“The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable,” writes Maria Popova in her new book, Figuring. At its core this book is precisely that: a beautifully woven collage of stories about how we tell stories. How we construct the narratives of individuals and humanity at large in order to make our relative millisecond of existence worthwhile.