I met Meg Wolitzer in Iceland. (How great is an opener is that sentence? I could hardly have invented better words to pass myself off as some sort of globetrotting, namedropping force.) I am going to have to tarnish the portrayal of my image a bit by fessing up that I...

I met Anna Quinn through a Facebook group for debut authors and was immediately intrigued both by her background and her book. Anna, a bookstore owner in the glorious northwest corner of Washington state, has a life I might have over-romanticized in my imagination: I p...

I'm back! Summer always unglues me, what with the heat and all the travel and the thousands of children running around and the alcohol. (Not that those last two are related.) What I lack in productivity and executive functioning skills, however, I make up for in readin...

The problem with reviewing a large amount of books is it's possible to use up all the superlatives, particularly if you are excitable by nature and therefore prone to hyperbole. A list of words comes to mind after reading Chris Cleave's latest work: poignant, witty, se...

I'll confess to a moment of jealousy here. I'm a soon-to-be-debut-novelist, and like every other writer on earth, I'd love to have written a literary masterpiece, replete with cultural significance and poetic prose and inescapable gravitas, the kind of book that causes...

Let’s open with this: a politician, the faux-folksy governor of Wyoming—who harbors presidential aspirations, despite a blatant disregard for the U.S. Constitution—is attacked in a park in Chicago. Various news outlets, in their haste to break the story, do not bother...

Lydia Millet’s superb literary thriller, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, has flown under the radar a bit. When it was published this May, it garnered all sorts of specta

I have a tremendous aversion to reading about torture. I can’t stand slasher flicks or brutality in movies either, particularly if it’s detailed. So I sweated and squirmed through the beginning of Colson Whitehead’s incredible new novel, The Underground Railroad, in wh...

Today, I'd like to introduce you to Nadia Hashimi, and her brilliant book, A House without Windows, which is the story of a woman accused of murder in Afghanistan.

So let’s begin with a brief, brief, brief history of Afghanistan. Okay, I can see you convulsing in the gr...

Bear with me, because at first this is going to sound like a hard sell. I want you to read about the torture of twins at Auschwitz, the suppression of women in Afghanistan, and the straight-up nerdy field of geobiology. I know about half of you stopped reading after th...