Alyte learns about the world through a series of encounters with other creatures, all of them trying to comprehend their place in a great chain of being. It’s a fairly terrifying adventure: He continually learns that eating or being eaten is part of everyday life, and that dying is “the natural order of things.” In […]
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a […]
Tergit’s novel, hitherto unavailable in English, is in part a roman à clef, narrated in unadorned, matter-of-fact prose. The Effinger family is a blend of urban and rural, secular and religious, socialist and capitalist, its paterfamilias a watchmaker in a small German town, his children striving to find their places in the world as the […]
“Prides are usually made up of lionesses, their cubs, and one to a few adult male lions,” the titular lioness explains. The savannah can be a dangerous place, and living together means “safety in numbers.” Our narrator is pregnant and knows her “babies need food to grow.” She dispatches prey with strength and skills she […]
Off the grid, in the jungles of Koh Samui, the author runs Happy Doggo Land, a sanctuary that delivers nutritious meals to street dogs, sterilizes as many dogs as possible, and finds homes for rehabilitated dogs. With humor, heart, and delightful photos, Harbison shares their stories. There’s Buster, a neglected pitbull described by the owner […]
When her daughter Noelle’s principal reports that April Soto’s brilliant 10-year old “bludgeoned” a schoolmate, comparing her to a “runaway freight train” and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April’s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April’s violence and […]
Owen Greene’s determined to have a good first year at Point University come hell or high water—even if hell is exactly what he gets. A team of scientists recently created a portal to an alternate dimension that contains basically every stereotypical element of a hell—“demons, brimstone, rivers of lava.” But Owen is shocked to learn […]
Middle-aged librarian Nelly finds escape from her solitary world in her love for (some might say obsession with) the life and work of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie books. Nelly’s fascination with the Little House books began early, partly as a means to escape a traumatic childhood that […]
Today, less than a third of Americans say they believe in the American Dream, and almost 20 percent believe that it never existed. To Libby, this is a tragic commentary on the state of America’s middle class and uninspired political leadership. In this robust volume, the author offers a new “radically moderate” vision for the […]
Don’t expect a have-a-good-cry-and-catharsis tale from Packer, who excels in diamond-hard dissections of tangled personal relations. She embeds the narrative in the perceptions of Eliot, who is blindsided when his wife, Claire, tells him that she wants her two best friends to take care of her in these final months, “instead of you.” It seems […]