Reading

A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

A personal collection of essays that blurs the line between literary criticism and personal memoir.

Set in the ruthless high society of Gilded Age New York, The House of Mirth traces the tragic downward spiral of Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished woman whose moral conscience repeatedly prevents her from securing a wealthy marriage for survival.

Unpublished works collected and translated by Peter Constantine

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

A short story about how to achieve empathy through compassion and imagination using the complexities of young children and adults as a prism.

discovery-of-heaven.jpg The Discovery of Heaven is framed by an ongoing conversation between two angels in heaven, looking down upon Earth. God has become profoundly disillusioned with humanity—specifically our technological arrogance, moral failures, and the dangerous hubris of splitting the atom. Feeling that mankind has broken its side of the spiritual bargain, God decides to terminate His covenant with the world. To do this, he demands the retrieval of the physical stone tablets containing the original Ten Commandments, removing them from...

a woman who died tragically in her early twenties during the 1970s and now serves as an ethereal death doula.

Short stories from renowned Chinese author Can Xue.

A collection of short stories.

Larry Levis brings raw emotion to his poetry; “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969” goes from zero to sixty in 3 seconds.

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....

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.

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...

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 (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 the...

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

Schweblin, an Argentinian writer, 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 impossible. 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,