At some point, we book-loving people will have to stop with the David Foster Wallace comparisons for any white male writer who toes the line between aggravating his reader with verbosity and writing long beautiful sentences imbued with the genius of their creator. But today is not that day. Nine years after his second novel, City on Fire, made an asteroid-sized splash in publishing, Garth “the next DFW” Risk Hallberg (even the three-name thing, too!) is back with his third effort, The Second Coming. But let’s back up and address that 600-pound gorilla in the room. Back in 2015, City on Fire cr ..read more

Some people have all the luck. Usually the luckiest people are attractive, white men, much like the protagonist of Teddy’s Wayne’s latest novel, The Winner. Wayne has built his career by crafting unlikable male protagonists and wielding a sharply honed narrative voice, and these skills culminate in The Winner. In the first pandemic summer of 2020, Conor O’Toole has just finished law school. His plans include studying for the bar, finding a law firm job, and teaching tennis. He’s negotiated his way into a private beach enclave on a spit of land just south of Cape Cod. In exchange for tennis les ..read more

One of the many vignettes that comprise Lauren Cook’s book of strange reflections, Sex Goblin, begins “It’s a book about living.” That is exactly what Sex Goblin is: a book about the many possible experiences, emotions, and epiphanies a life can include, which, as in life, may or may not ever be resolved in a way one would call “satisfying.” In fact, we are given glimpses of several possible lives that run the gamut from prosaic to bizarre, and are often both those things at once in the way that most lives are. Sex Goblin appears to be a record of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes these thought ..read more

“Each of us who grew up on the internet filled our squishy, spongy brains with hyper-specific signifiers,” Honor Levy writes half-way through her delightful debut, My First Book. But here lies the double-edged sword of a short story collection like Levy’s: when you pack a story with “hyper-specific signifiers,” do you risk alienating an audience? A part of me worries for the reader not invited to the party. Another part of me is too busy having a good time. At first glance, My First Book is primarily concerned with the anxieties of living in our present day, where the boundaries between digita ..read more

In 1938, the remote Welsh island where Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall takes place is floundering. The climate is changing, forcing the local fishing community to confront treacherous tides and a shrinking catch. Young people are departing for factory jobs on the mainland. Eighteen-year-old Manod, who has completed the meager education available to islanders, has only two options: leave or get married. Unable to choose, she remains in limbo, keeping house for her surly father and trying to manage her wild younger sister, Llinos. When two English anthropologists, Joan and Edward, arrive to cond ..read more

Beginning a Claire Messud novel is like beginning a journey: coat on, suitcase in hand, you reach for the door and turn the knob, knowing you’ll be profoundly changed by the time you return. As I began Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, the feeling was the same, though having gained by now some wisdom from previous experiences, I had the sense this time to bring a bigger suitcase, as it were, to fit more souvenirs. Here is a book to savor, to slow down to, to mark up and reread. Like in traveling, when we can feel more attuned to the present moment but feel the insistent tug ..read more

In the opening pages of R.O. Kwon’s novel Exhibit, Jin Han sits on the lip of a swimming pool and shifts the angle of her sunhat to create a pattern on her partner, Philip: “Strips of light rippled then slashed open, limbs flailing through bright ribbons.” It’s a testament to her exacting narrative that just one sentence reflects the novel’s inner workings, from characterization and themes, to structure and language. Jin is one of three Korean women in Exhibit, her worldview encapsulated in this image: a photographer’s attention to light and shadow, and a lover’s preoccupation with pain and de ..read more

More women today are talking about getting older. About being beyond the reach of sex-focused TV ads and ceasing to care. Or about caring too much. About fearing the loss of a sex drive or actually losing it. About what it means to lose the things you thought always made you desirable.  Historically, menopause has rarely been treated with compassion, more the butt of jokes—the hot flashes! the dryness!—and simultaneously something women must hide, elegantly. Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, is hyper-aware of this way we’ve failed women. The novel is a funny, sexy, and loving portra ..read more

Emily Jon Tobias’s debut short story collection, Monarch, hits the shelves on May 17th—full force. It isn’t just the subject matter that propels these stories—alcohol and drug abuse, sexual assault, mania—it’s Tobias’s crisp, forward-moving sentences that materialize from a deep inhabitation of character. For example, in “Nova,” we can see, smell, and feel the character Jones: Looked up, and there she was—big and noble—out of nowhere, like my mama’s old ceramic Madonna. Jones…I caught a musky whiff of Jones off the afternoon Venice wind…She occupied every inch of her very own matte black 1974 ..read more

Early in Andrea Hairston’s novel Archangels of Funk, the protagonist dances to Parliament’s 1976 single “Doctor Funkenstein,” in which the eponymous doctor invites his audience — co-conspirators or test subjects? — to party. Later, I returned to this passage with the strange feeling that I’d become one of Andrea Hairston’s test subjects myself.  How exactly to define Hairston’s latest novel? It’s not exactly science fiction, or steampunk, or cyberpunk. It’s closer to solarpunk (Hairston is an avowed fan of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, one of the foundational texts of the subgenre ..read more