Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi If there’s such a thing as a rock star in the study of ancient classics, Mary Beard deserves the title. Her book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is an approachable starting point for the Rome-curious, and she’s often tapped for cultural and historical commentary by television networks and publishers alike. Between her publicity bona fides…
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi The multiverse is a compelling, if embattled, narrative device. When executed well, stories that play with the multiverse invite audiences to consider the constantly changing permutations of narrative pieces as they skip across realities. The multiverse functions as whatever you need it to be, and it’s always out there: to be discovered, to be traversed, to…
Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi Colored People Time, the debut collection from writer-producer Manny Fidel, is an uneven read. Driven by Fidel’s personable and at times overly colloquial style, the assembled essays and criticism focus on time’s influence over identity. Essays about 9/11’s irrevocable shift in the author’s worldview, for example, appear alongside eulogies for the summer of 2016, the dying…
Reviewed by Pallas M. Gutierrez The Tilting House by Ivonne Lamazares follows Yuri, a Cuban teenager during the country’s Special Period, as she navigates the return of her formerly unknown sister and her escape to New York City. Mariela, Yuri’s sister, returns from la Yuma (the United States) in 1993 to uplift the Cuban people and her own artistic practice.…
Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi Ian Frazier is obsessed with details and with the specific: the color of an old friend’s kitchen (daffodil yellow), the length of the world’s largest beaver dam (2,790 feet), the inscription on an armored car from the Russian Revolution (“Enemy of Capital”). This particularity suffuses everything Frazier writes. In The Snakes That Ate Florida—a compilation of…
Reviewed by Shannon Glass In her latest novel, Mercy, Joan Silber gives a multigenerational perspective on the ripples that radiate from one person’s gravest regret. In distinct, hauntingly clear internal monologues, Silber illustrates the many ways that people can show mercy to others and, most importantly, themselves. Each character’s romantic, platonic, and familial relationships take center stage in complicated ways…
Reviewed by Sydney Abraham Lorena Hughes’s historical novel The Night We Became Strangers covers many themes, including grief, remorse, romance, and pursuit. The book is a fictionalized account of the catastrophic 1949 Ecuador adaptation of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, during which listeners were never informed that the broadcast of Martians invading the Earth was fiction and thus…
Reviewed by T.J. Tranchell Certain books defy expectations, even when a reader goes into one without them. Uncanny Valley Girls, the new memoir by poet Zefyr Lisowski, adeptly subverts even the expectations that seem to be set up by the author. Lisowski brings a self-deprecating sense of humor along with an expansive openness to this recounting of her life as…
Reviewed by Eric Martin Minor Black Figures finds Brandon Taylor taking up art and artists as his subject, as he did in his novel The Late Americans. This time, the setting is New York City and the artists aren’t writers. They’re painters. They’re sculptors. They make videos. Importantly, they’re also insiders in a small circle of ambitious artists, a milieu…
Reviewed by Betty Fall Zuzana Říhová’s Playing Wolf is an at times elusive yet consistently dread-inducing fairytale that challenges its readers to unravel the chaotic mess of motivations, emotions, and intentions of its characters to better understand the misery that is soon to transpire. Translated to English by Alex Zucker, the story follows husband and wife Bohumil and Bohumila Novotný…
Reviewed by Noelle Trost Helen Oyeyemi has long been celebrated for her blending of the surreal with the everyday. She casts reimagined fairytales with a coating of her own formidable imagination—such as in Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird—reworking familiar stories in opulent, detailed, and extravagant ways while maintaining a sharp eye for human relationships. Her latest novel, A New…
Reviewed by Jessica Ribera Evoking riveting murder and courtroom dramas from its start, Victor Suthammanont’s debut novel Hollow Spaces combines the satisfaction of solving a mystery and the adrenaline of a thriller. With tight, descriptive language and carefully developed depictions of emotion and relationships, it also presents as a literary family drama in which the siblings’ opposing beliefs about their…