Hong Kong Book Club

A former student travels to interview his 90ish professor for a magazine article. His recording device (an iPhone) breaks just before…

Short stories from renowned Chinese author Can Xue.

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

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

stoner It’s all spoilers below, so get the book and read it. I found it engaging, though I have a bit of trouble with the premise some back of the book blurb makes about ‘readers worldwide’ are coming to a new appreciation of this book. William Stoner feels stuck on a family farm, performing the same chores day-in-day-out. Perhaps his parents pick up on this and decide to send him to university to pursue a course in agriculture, which he...

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

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.

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....

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 impossible. A young man of the Gikuyu tribe named Waiyaki is the focal point in...

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)

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

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

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

The contemporary art world comes face to face with one Michel Houellebecq.

The trivial moments in life often hold greater meaning than grand events? Find out here.

Why not write the big story of the past by telling the little ones?

A tale that revolves around a wealthy financier, Benjamin Rask, and his enigmatic wife, Helen.

August book club selection

A new and compelling discovery for me. The work is difficult to summarize or put into a genre, oddly.

A brief but oddly engaging novel narrated by a grammar school student.

My favorite collection of Saunders' short stories until Tenth of December

Two light-skinned Black women from the same neighborhood follow very different trajectories in life and one day reconnect.

Essays out of central Europe during the First Cold War by one of Poland's leading intellectuals.

The book that influenced Orwell, Huxley and Rand.

Set in 19th-century Germany, the story follows the life of Effi Briest

A chilling novel based on a true story, which begins with hope and ends in tragedy.

The Bear follows a young boy named Isaac McCaslin, who goes on numerous hunting trips into the wilderness with his uncle and other men.

The novel begins with the childhood incident that shapes Ramsay's life.

An eerie and evocative masterpiece with a nameless protagonist.

Hemingway's _To Have and Have Not_ is a commentary on the time of The Great