Review: ‘Unbecoming’ by Rebecca Scherm
By the end of Rebecca Scherm's debut novel, "Unbecoming," the protagonist, Grace, has transformed herself from a small-town sweetheart into an ice-cold international jewel thief. Yearning for a sense of...
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Review: ‘See How Small’ by Scott Blackwood
In 1991, four teenage girls, two of them sisters, were bound and gagged with their own clothes, raped, and shot to death in an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt shop...
Review: ‘Almost Famous Women’ by Megan Mayhew Bergman
'Maybe the world had been bad to its great and unusual women," muses a character in what might be the thesis statement of Megan Mayhew Bergman's second short story collection,...
‘How to Be Both’: Ali Smith’s coin-flip
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used the "duck-rabbit," a reversible image that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, to illustrate different ways of seeing. Ali Smith's sixth novel,...
Review: ‘The Unspeakable’ by Meghan Daum
What remains "unspeakable" in an age of self-revelation, when shocking secrets are so much fodder for retweeted Internet confessionals? The essays in Meghan Daum's fourth book, "The Unspeakable," are neither...
Review: ‘100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write’ by Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl, the Chicago-born playwright whose elegant, funny, thoughtful plays garnered her a MacArthur "genius grant" at the age of 32, hates the word "whimsy." That's not something you might...
Review: ‘Love Me Back’ by Merritt Tierce
There's only two times in a restaurant: before and after," an Olive Garden waiter says to the young narrator of "Love Me Back" during her first training shift. "You walk...
Review: ‘A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing’ by Eimear McBride
In James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Stephen Dedalus glimpses a girl on the beach "alone and still, gazing out to sea" and experiences an...
Reviews: ‘Women in Clothes’ and ‘Worn Stories’
Gray suede pixie boots and a yoked chambray skirt that swished around my calves at the fourth-grade square dance. A pair of Converse shoes a friend decorated with a ballpoint...
Review: ‘Friendswood’ by René Steinke
Once, on a second date in Chicago, I was asked if Houston looked like West Texas; if it was, in fact, a blighted landscape of cactus and tumbleweeds. My answer...