Home

Labyrinthine masterpiece that captures the slow-motion collapse of a Hungarian collective farm.

A series of reflective essays about moving through the landscapes of the West Bank and Gaza region.

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival....

Pablo Neruda poem.

Nero Golden, patriarch in his twilight, a Lear in a silk dressing gown, presiding over a trio of sons who embody current fractured anxieties.

A truly remarkable novel that begins with a tragic turn of events for the Steenwijk family

Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a travel narrative recounting an 1689 journey cross-country.

William Stoner, a dedicated Missouri farm boy turned English professor whose modest career, unfulfilling marriage, and late-in-life love affair reveal the profound beauty, dignity, and quiet tragedy of an ordinary existence.

V.S. Naipaul novel about an immigrant's experience of England.

tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.webp A friend’s daughter was assigned this book in class (high school) and she recommended it highly, so I figured, ok, I know she’s a bright young woman with a dad with good taste in friends, so I read the first free chapters and was hooked. First, it’s about the gaming industry, second it’s about young entrepreneurs, third it’s about friendship, fourth it has allegorical underpinnings from a certain Greek epic, fifth, it touches on many contemporary hot-button political issues...

Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket arrives like a cipher slipped under the door of contemporary America.

The thematic core of the novel interrogates the limits of knowledge and memory.

Ned Merrill is at a party and suddenly envisions himself as a great man about to embark on a swim across the county by way of backyard pools in a tony suburban NY community.

in xanadu A travel adventure to commemorate Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road, Scottish historian (a Cambridge student at the time he took this journey), William Dalrymple, uses older historic narratives and maps to help guide him and fellow travelers from the Holy Land to Xanadu (Shan-tu, just north of Beijing). Dalrymple's more recent book, The Golden Road posits that Indian ships were a more economical and vital trade route than the better known (and slower) land route of...

I separate these very well-written stories into the following categories: dark, sad or scary.

Argentinian writer Schweblin has written the finest story I've yet read about someone experiencing dementia…

Cuba Libre Leonard made extensive use of research and a researcher named Gregg Sutter for many of his novels, and Cubra Libre seems to be one of the more exhaustively researched and well-penned (he never used a computer or word processor, and rarely a typewriter) books in his oeuvre. Leonard, who began as a writer of westerns, then turned to city crime books, is back in semi-familiar territory in this book with a cowboy protagonist (Tyler) running horses to Cuba....

An unfortunate bit of timing has our hero captured in a front page story

The River Between A wake-up book for the study of post-colonialism in Africa and a spark point for outrage by public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens from what was made known to the world (female genital mutilation). It will challenge anyone’s worldview and where they sit on the moral relativist scale. The choice presented in this novel between the Christian missionaries and indigenous tribal rights is unrealistic. A young man of the Gikuyu tribe named Waiyaki is the focal point in...

The walk and the environs are the stage settings for the people Mod encounters,

There is a vibrant quality running through the narrator's life that I would equate to a good noir detective novel that keeps the page-turning pace up, with the occasional weirdo wandering into the story (more than a few times)

Fiennes' production in which the poem is the script, performed in a theatre with subtle changes of light, and accompanied by film interludes of the locations associated with the poem's four sections.

UFO nutjobs find themselves in an extremely well-written novel.

Christopher Hitchens reflects on his upbringing, the influences that shaped him, and the philosophical foundations of his worldview.

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession.

A novella that is the confession of Pozdnyshev, a man who recounts the tragic unraveling of his life and marriage. Very Russian fare.

Essays on the intricacies of literature, focusing on the importance of originality,

A tale of an unusual 18th century mutiny.

Narrated by fellow mouse, who reflects on Josephine's (a mouse) significance

A young man falls for a dancer and in promoting her falls into debt, and