Fiction

Review: İSTANBUL İSTANBUL by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein
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Review: İSTANBUL İSTANBUL by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein

İstanbul İstanbul Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein OR Books, May 2016 192 pp, $18 Buy: paperback | eBook Unlike in New York, where managing to live in the city for ten years grants one the status of being a New Yorker, rarely will you meet a person living in Istanbul who will be identified…

Review: HORSEFEVER by Lee Hope
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Review: HORSEFEVER by Lee Hope

Lee Hope, in her richly imagined and ambitious novel, Horsefever, explores a similar dynamic both between rider and horse and between women and men, but she goes beyond Lawrence to explore riding as a metaphor for the challenge and art of story-telling. Her story-in-progress itself becomes the author’s mount, as it were, a mount with a will and spirit of its own.

On Building Believable Characters in Fiction
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On Building Believable Characters in Fiction

Before I picked up a copy of Offshore last month, it had been years since I read Penelope Fitzgerald, a British author who didn’t start writing until she was in her sixties. But the characters in this Booker Prize-winning novel caught my attention and I soon became completely emerged in Fitzgerald’s cleverly constructed world. Set…

Review: THE STARGAZER’S SISTER by Carrie Brown
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Review: THE STARGAZER’S SISTER by Carrie Brown

The Stargazer’s Sister Carrie Brown Pantheon, January 2016 352 pp; $25.95 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Ellen Birkett Morris Here it is, the moon that has followed her everywhere through her childhood—racing between treetops to find her, darting over rooflines, appearing suddenly in the river at her feet or reflected in the barrel in the…

Other Countries
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Other Countries

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Black Writer In America is a cosmopolitan entity. The news can do that to you, even in February. Obviously there’s Harlem, and before that, there was the mass exodus from the South to the North, to experience life among people who wouldn’t hit you for wanting it….

Sketch of Jane Austen
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Challenging Cultural Norms: Contemporary British Women Authors

  It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized what I’d been searching for all along. An avid reader, I absorbed a variety of books during my childhood and adolescence. These were carefully screened by my well-meaning but stifling folks, who paled at the thought me reading about sex and infidelities, teenage…