Review: Martin Seay’s ‘Mirror Thief’
Martin Seay's "The Mirror Thief," begins as a detective novel and ends as an existential cry into the ether. Set in Venice, Italy; Venice Beach, Calif., and a replica of...
Home > Reviews
All Stories
‘Secondhand Time’: Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s latest oral history
They say history is written by the winners, but after victory the vanquished continue to draw breath. Svetlana Alexievich has taken it upon herself to commit the stories of the...
‘Square Wave’ by Mark de Silva fast forwards to 2027
Mark de Silva's "Square Wave" is a maddening puzzle of a book. Set mostly in 2027 in the fictional East Coast metropolis of Halsley, it is a novel long on...
Jill Lepore digs for secrets in ‘Joe Gould’s Teeth’
Joe Gould was a legendary nut. He was the kind of street person whose rants sometimes cohered into poetry. He couldn't stop writing, filling many dozens of cheap notebooks and...
‘Bullies’ details unlikely reunion between writer, tormentor
Alex Abramovich's "Bullies: A Friendship" begins as memoir but ends as witness testimony to an era in American history. When Abramovich stumbles upon an old Long Island, N.Y, yearbook picture...
Novel ‘The Fugue’ examines immigrant experience in Cicero
Gint Aras' magisterial novel "The Fugue" plays for all the marbles. Crisscrossing six decades in the lives of some dozen souls, it anchors its polyphony of voices to a very...
‘Trouble Boys’ dives into The Replacements
"Trouble Boys," Bob Mehr's thoroughly researched and eminently readable biography of The Replacements, is the type of book any band (or any artist of any kind, for that matter) would...
Hillary Chute’s ‘Disaster Drawn’ argues illustrations, comics capture true horror of war
The provocative idea at the heart of Hillary Chute's "Disaster Drawn" is that comics should be accepted as a true testament of war in the same way historical writings, documentary...
Russian emigres shaken up by Montana son in ‘Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo’
We meet Maya Shulman in a New York kitchen, in the midst of a cooking frenzy. She's in America on a soon-to-expire medical school visa but has a dream to...
‘Fardwor, Russia!’ by Oleg Kashin satirizes Putin’s Russia
In 2010, two months after turning in his manuscript for "Roissya Vperde" to his publisher, Oleg Kashin was approached outside his Moscow apartment building by a man with a bouquet...