The Seven Sisters book by Margaret Drabble reviewed by Marisa Knox
Peter Ibbetson
What would literary heroines of old have done without an inheritance? Would Jane Eyre have met Rochester again on her own terms? Would Isabel Archer have been the prey of…
Fiction
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation book by Translated by W.S. Merwin reviewed by James Coleman
As everyone knows, a proper Knight of the Round table cannot tolerate an affront to his honor. Due to some clause in the chivalric code, Arthur and his boys seem…
Three Junes book by Julia Glass reviewed by Daniel Barrett
Julia Glass admires Shakespeare, Pope, and George Eliot, but she says her desire to write like them is an “unrequited craving.” Right she is. Three Junes more closely resembles a…
The Cave book by Jose Saramago reviewed by Paige Austin
In one of his most famous allegories, Plato writes in his Republic: “Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling… They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same…
Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories book by A.M. Holmes reviewed by Katherine Poltorak
“I am lost”—a short sentence in the first paragraph of “The Chinese Lesson”— sums up the main theme of A.M. Homes’s latest collection of short stories, Things You Should Know.…
Prague book by Arthur Phillips reviewed by Conor O’Toole
Among this novel’s unexpected features is its setting: not Prague but Budapest, Hungary, in 1990. There, a collection of North American expatriates soaks up a bit of the newly reformed…
You Shall Know Our Velocity book by David Eggers reviewed by Alexander Benaim
David Eggers’s fiction debut “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” falls staggeringly short of the high mark set by his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In “Genius,” Eggers…
Versailles: A Novel book by Kathryn Davis reviewed by Sophie Pinkham
In the summers of my youth, I devoured my father’s old children’s books. Among these was a collection of historical novels from the 1950s, each with the more unsavory details…
You Are Not a Stranger Here book by Adam Haslett reviewed by Marisa Knox
Writing about depression is a perilous practice. The temptation in seeking to realistically depict what Macbeth calls “the petty pace” of life for depressed people, the agonizing succession of empty…
The Seal Wife book by Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison’s most recent novel is a finely detailed if somewhat dull historical fiction that considers the development of one man’s character in the context of developing scientific technology. In…