Samaritan book by Richard Price reviewed by Dan Mattingly
Peter Ibbetson
Read the first few pages of Samaritan, Richard Price’s latest epistle from the ghetto, and it’s clear Price wants this book to be a serious thriller. It begins with a…
Fiction
East of Eden book by John Steinbeck reviewed by Jia Lynn Yang
The buzz on books this summer was all about the non-revelations of a former first lady who stuck by her philandering man and a kid wizard’s new adolescent angst. But…
Cloud of Sparrows book by Takashi Matsuoka reviewed by Su Mon Han
Takashi Matsuoka’s first novel takes us to 1861, six years after the opening of Japan to the West. Genji, the young, charismatic Great Lord of Akaoka, welcomes a small group…
“The Little Friend book by Donna Tartt reviewed by Sonja Ostrow”
Writers, like pop stars, are often one-hit wonders. Assignation to this category seemed to be the fate of Donna Tartt, whose intellectual thriller The Secret History was published in 1992.…
The Seven Sisters book by Margaret Drabble reviewed by Marisa Knox
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…
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…