Reviews
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The Kingdom Within
In a new collection, Anthony Doerr lovingly explores the topography of the natural world and the shifting interior landscapes of memory.
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The Shaking Woman
Siri Hustvedt’s memoir is a sprawling exploration of memory and the ways trauma manifests in physical illness—less Mary Karr, more Oliver Sacks.
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Better She Had Slapped Me
Tongue contains none of the typical tricks, irony, or obsessive self-absorption of many recent books. Each poem is self-contained, yet are all of a piece.
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Moving Pictures
A husband-and-wife team of graphic novelists move from superhero tales to a stark, quiet story about art and the Holocaust.
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Brace Yourself
Jennifer Richter’s poems invite us to understand that each of us is a threshold—something pain passes through.
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Imperial Bedrooms
I felt like the book pulsed in my bag, a bright-covered blip that kept demanding I come back and progress a few pages.
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Under the Small Lights
This prize-winning novella takes a mature, nuanced look at a group of friends trying to navigate the transition from adolescence into adulthood.
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Like Mercury Over a Wall of Garnets
A particular joy of this book is the apprehension of current—biological, electric and historical, and in other forms—that distinguishes the most rigorously thrumming beats from their sallow imitators.
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The Unveiled Animal
Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption.
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Wait
Now in his seventh decade, C. K. Williams has published many books and won the big prizes, but the poems in Wait are fresh—he does not merely rely on old blueprints, but continues the struggles that have preoccupied him throughout…
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One Art
Michael Sledge’s novel The More I Owe You imagines Elizabeth Bishop’s life, and love, in Brazil.
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The Work of the Day, Which is Slaughtering
In Joshua Cohen’s hyperreal world of kitsch, the Sabbath becomes law, Auschwitz becomes Whateverwitz, and the world’s last Jew is on the run.