Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
It’s the possibility of unexpected connections between narratives that fascinated me and kept me in love with reading over time.
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
Sometimes you read a book and you think, Oh. This is what a book can be.
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
The premise is harrowing, the prose is stark and beautiful, the plotting is impeccable, and there's something utterly heartbreaking in El Akkad's subtle rendition of the ways in which war shapes the human soul.
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
'Skyfaring' is a love letter to flight, to a profession, and reading it is a balm. Vanhoenacker slips easily between poetic meditation into the nature and history of travel and technical explanations of the mechanisms of the 747, and it is a delight to encounter someone so unabashedly enamored of the romance of his profession.
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
Without reservation, I would call J.M. Ledgard's Submergence a masterpiece.
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The Land of Ice and Snow: On Lars Iyer’s ‘Wittgenstein Jr.’
No one’s sure whose idea it was to call the new professor Wittgenstein, but it seems somehow fitting. He is a maddening teacher. No one quite follows what he's trying to convey. But he seems, in some essential way, like the real thing.
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Meanwhile, in a Dark Forest: On Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale
A Fairy Tale is a fascinating and often brutal meditation on alienation and trauma. “What separates man from any other species,” Peter’s father told him one evening, before it all came undone, “is his ability to adapt.” But in A Fairy Tale, adaptation is precisely the problem.
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A Closed World: On By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a staggering accomplishment, an exquisite and often ecstatic rendition of a tumultuous affair: “Jupiter has been with Leda, I thought, and now nothing can avert the Trojan wars. All legend will be broken, but who will escape alive?”
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A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
What makes Scissors extraordinary isn't Stéphane Michaka's technical fireworks, but the humanity and compassion with which he presents his flawed and fascinating characters, in their struggles with alcoholism, with one another, with their work, with themselves.
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On The Pleasures and Solitudes of Quiet Books
"Books are solitudes in which we meet," Rebecca Solnit wrote. But before the meeting comes the solitude, the book as a private space that a reader steps into, and there are moments when escaping into a book is a bid for some measure of seclusion. If the solitude you crave at the moment is a quiet one, here’s a short reading list of quiet books that I've recently read and admired.
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The Asking is Both Graceful and Profound: On the Stories of Josephine Rowe
In the absence of context, only the things that are truly important remain: someone was here, and freight trains broke their heart, and someone wanted them to stay but they didn't.
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A Woman’s Unraveling: On Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist
The rapidly loosening mores of that time looked like freedom, but the level of risk that comes with freedom is never, of course, the same for everyone. Everyone who frequented the speakeasies of 1920s New York was taking a risk, but some had a net to catch them if they fell, and others didn’t.
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Motherless Tacoma: On Eric Barnes’s Something Pretty, Something Beautiful
Cars are freedom, stories are everything, and home is thick with ghosts.
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The Bulldozing Powers of Cheap
Story of My People is an angry, eloquent, and beautifully written book, a hybrid of memoir and social commentary that took Italy’s prestigious Strega prize in 2011. This is a story about a man who loved his company and had to sell it, but this story is a microcosm for the decline of the Italian textiles industry and, more broadly, for the decline of manufacturing in the first world as industry has turned to cheaper labor markets elsewhere.
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War is Just Business: John le Carré’s A Delicate Truth
There are moments when the machinery of plot grinds a little too obviously, but Le Carré remains formidable. Here, as elsewhere in his body of work, Le Carré proves himself a master of character development.
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Just How Far Will She Go? Nicole Wolverton’s The Trajectory of Dreams
In The Trajectory of Dreams, Wolverton has created one of the most haunting unreliable narrators I’ve ever come across. She is both deeply sympathetic and extremely dangerous.
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Staff Pick: Terese Svoboda’s Tin God
There's a feeling, reading this book, of encountering something that hasn’t been done before. It seems to me that Terese Svoboda is a true original.
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I Await The Devil’s Friend Request: On Social Media and Mary MacLane
What participation in social media comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life, or you don’t. Mary MacLane would have been a natural.
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