Neal Stephenson’s Thriller ‘Polostan’ Is a Wild Ride Through 1930s America
Neal Stephenson’s thrilling and slow-burn historical thriller Polostan presents the 1930s as a calamitous carnival ride building inexorably toward Hiroshima.
fiction
The Journey Motif in ‘The Half-Life of Guilt’ Is No Guilt Trip
There is no guilty pleasure in reading Lynn Stegner’s The Half-Life of Guilt. There is only pleasure.
Feminine Discontents in ‘Back from the Dead’ and ‘The Other One’
Catherine Turney, a top-drawer writer of classic films about strong women, adapts her supernatural novel The Other One for Back from the Dead.
Tommy Orange Testifies to the Power of Cultural Reclamation
In Wandering Stars masterful storyteller Tommy Orange shifts our lens from historically imposed assimilation to contemporary cultural reclamation.
Colin Barrett’s Debut Novel ‘Wild Houses’ Unfolds Predictably
The narrative in Colin Barrett’s debut novel Wild Houses unfolds predictably, without much in the way of plot twists or surprises.
Living with Uncertainty in ‘The Sterns Are Listening’
Below the surface clutter of its frenetic plot line, The Sterns Are Listening deftly deals with dwelling ‘peacefully in doubt’.
Author Jerome Charyn on the Complex Demons in ‘Ravage & Son’
Author Jerome Charyn’s Ravage & Son is a brutal novel written with a beauty that transcends the violence, providing an empathetic look into human complexity.
The Surreal, Dazzling Desert World of Melissa Broder’s ‘Death Valley’
Melissa Broder’s quality of being “terminally online” lends Death Valley an air of immediacy that grounds its surreal, dazzling moments in poignant emotional realism.
Two Men in a Tub: A Sudsy Interview with Humorist Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham’s Rub-A-Dub-Dub slips neck-deep into the wet hot mess of middle-age angst. From the comfort of his bath, so to speak, he talks about it.
In ‘Girlfriend on Mars’ a RomCom Competes with Climate Change
Girlfriend on Mars equips itself nicely on the climate change front, but subsuming that narrative and the tensions within it into the love story redirects the novel’s orbit.
Acid Trips Meet Ancestral Trauma in ‘All-Night Pharmacy’
With the same shocking specificity that sets apart her poetry, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy brings us uncomfortably close to everything the narrator witnesses in a hospital waiting room.
The Punk Rock Sci-Fi of Izumi Suzuki’s ‘Hit Parade of Tears’
Though her fiction retains elements of future conjecture and civilizational prognosis, like punk rock itself, Izumi Suzuki is more committed to the sci-fi genre as an edgy social and emotional analysis tool.