Small-Town Tragedy, Big-Time Resentments
With subtlety, Susan Henderson attempts to understand, deconstruct, and empathize with small-town America....
The Dark Side of Nice
D. Berton Emerson on Carrie Tirado Bramen’s “American Niceness: A Cultural History”...
In the Habitations of Specters: On Stephen Graham Jones’s “Mapping the Interior”
Readers can feel confident following Stephen Graham Jones into the dark and obscure landscapes of his fiction....
How Stan Lee Became the Man Behind Marvel
Chris Yogerst on Bob Batchelor's recent biography of the comic book legend....
The Spirit of the Game
Joshua W. Jackson reviews David Wanczyk's "Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind."...
Sharp but Narrow
Jacquelyn Ardam reviews Michelle Dean’s “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art Out of Having an Opinion.”...
Annotations of Pain: First Love in “The Only Story”
Thomas J. Millay finds Julian Barnes’s “The Only Story” a perplexing, profoundly enjoyable story about the phenomenology of love....
“Living in the Shadows of the Dead”: Cathy Otten’s “With Ash on Their Faces”
Cathy Otten’s new book tells the tragic story of the Yezidi women taken captive by ISIS....
Laughing in the Dark: On J. R. Pick’s “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals”
A. M. Bakalar reviews “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” a novella by J. R. Pick, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker....
Beast Mode
Colin Dickey on Peter Sahlins’s “1668: The Year of the Animal in France”...
Free to What?: Reading Zadie Smith at a Best Western in Texas
While traveling in Texas, Aisha Sabatini Sloan takes in the culture and Zadie Smith’s “Feel Free.”...
The Gluttonous Genre Mutations of Rodrigo Fresán
The prose in Rodrigo Fresán’s “The Bottom of the Sky” bristles with energy....
