A Theory of Love by Margaret Bradham Thornton
The novel, which shifts third-person perspective between two lovers, reveals the impossibility of ever fully knowing someone when thoughts are inscrutable even to the people thinking them.
Book Reviews
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
In A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s stunning debut collection, the stories are not formally linked, and yet they are, implicitly, by their beautiful prose, by their intimate gaze at character, by their focus on black men, by their setting in New York City.
Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny and the Perils of Female Desire
“The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.” So begins Leïla Slimani’s French bestseller, translated into English by Sam Taylor. The thriller won France’s Prix Goncourt—Moroccan-born Slimani is only the twelfth woman to win the award—and uses an American news story as its source.
West by Carys Davies
There is a pathos and also an infuriating self-indulgence to the central protagonist, Cy, obsessed with finding lost dinosaurs, rumours of which abound, in the lands beyond the Mississippi.
The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl
Hampl has been writing at the intersection of memoir and essay for most of her life. Now, displaying a heightened partnership of experience and reflection, she revisits people and events with insight produced by leisure and the ostensibly wasted day.
Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows
Inherent to Dictionary Stories is the question of what makes an ideal sentence that best reveals the meaning of a word.
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Invoking the “boundless” and the “limitless,” Nezhukumatathil sets out a simple, yet profound, argument about our relations with the natural world: the more we feel the ocean’s embrace, the sooner we sense its particular “hum” everywhere.
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
The Female Persuasion never disappoints: there are twists and turns that keep us guessing, new voices to take on the storytelling task, and heartbreak as friends and lovers disappoint, deceive, and part ways.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
The Recovering isn’t Jamison’s attempt to revive her narrative instincts, which she fears sobriety has flatlined. Instead, it is an embrace of the hard-learned revised instincts Jamison has developed because of recovery.