Space Oddity
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space Janna Levin Knopf, 2016; 256pp The romance of the cosmos is the subject of Black Hole Blues. The romance of bodies of unimaginable size colliding...
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Review: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
The Sellout Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover) / Picador (paperback), 2015; 304pp Entering the world like the bastard love-child of a Chris Rock routine and a Thomas Pynchon...
read moreSeriously Questioning… Richard Cohen
In How To Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers (Random House, 2016), Richard Cohen shares with readers the magpied loot of a lifetime of reading. Packed with examples...
read moreAgnus Dei
Sweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters...
read moreSeriously Questioning… Madeleine Thien
Last month, Madeleine Thien’s third novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Do Not Say We Have Nothing (W.W. Norton), which is set in both present-day Vancouver and the China of...
read moreSeriously Questioning… James Rebanks
“Thousand shades of grey”. Picture from James Rebanks’s hugely popular Twitter feed, @herdyshepherd1. “When English people dream of a rural arcadia, they usually dream of our...
read more“Oh Beauty, You Are the Light of the World!”
The Light of the World: A Memoir Elizabeth Alexander Grand Central Publishing, 2015; 240pp Elizabeth Alexander’s lovely, sad memoir is a tale of two thunderbolts. The first: love at first...
read moreThe Eye of the Blackbird
Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy...
read moreSeriously Questioning… Alexander Chee
“A more impressive, richly imagined novel I have not read in many years,” wrote Lauren Elkin in the Financial Times. “A book that I look forward to rereading, savoring, studying...
read moreSeriously Questioning… J. Michael Straczynski
J. Michael Straczynski is a screenwriter, television polymath, comic book writer, and novelist, and one of four speakers at our next Seriously Entertaining show, This Is Not the End, on September...
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