The balloon comes down at sunrise. It has been drifting all night with three children curled in the bottom of a small wicker basket painted with stars and stripes, and now the ground is rushing up to meet it: church towers, red roofs, a wide stone plaza where a crowd is gathering to stare. The […]
Category: Book Reviews
Synopsis: An idyllic paradise. A deadly secret. A detective who can’t escape the past. When Detective Karen Skaryd and her husband arrive at a luxurious Caribbean resort to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they expect sun, relaxation, and romance. But when a prominent guest drops dead in the middle of lunch—with a cryptic biblical message […]
A celebration of curiosity, conversation, and the joy of learning There are books that tell stories, books that present arguments, and books that document lives. Letters 2 Lance occupies a rather more unusual space. Across two substantial volumes, Jack Dunsmoor constructs an extended correspondence that is at once memoir, travelogue, reading journal, historical reflection, philosophical […]
An impassioned manifesto on human creativity, intelligence, and ambition Intelligence isn’t just about retaining facts. In this ambitious, deeply thought-provoking work, author Scott Hadley Morgan divulges that it’s about observation, art, expanding the mind, and using the tools at your disposal without overusing them. Accelerating Intelligence is an expansive book on the nature of intelligence. […]
The bathroom is small, tiled and loud. Somebody has turned on every tap, and the water drums into the tub while two men sit close together and talk under the noise. One is a major in the KGB, a big, restless Russian who once played in a Moscow rock band. The other is a young […]
It is a quiet Tuesday that has turned busy without warning. A small wine bar in Hobart is short one staff member, every table is full, and a nervous junior sommelier is carrying too many glasses. They hit the floor. She bursts into tears. For a second the whole room stops, the owner included, standing […]
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If Not You by Ellen O’Clover
It is January in Chicago, late at night, and cold enough that the tears on a young woman’s face are starting to freeze. She is standing on the platform at the Diversey stop, coming home from a party she should have enjoyed. A train pulls in. A man she knows far too well steps toward […]
An irreverent, blood-soaked morsel of Western horror with a metafictional twist (and flying sharks) Both the title and premise of Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks promise a romp akin to Sharknado and other gleefully kitschy creature features: man-eating sharks that follow storms, spawning in leftover puddles and chewing their way through entire communities as they […]
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Fallow by Sarah Anderson
The room has no curtains between the beds, which she likes. People talk to each other. A nurse with a felt strawberry clipped in her hair tells her she has really prominent veins, and then that she is a good bleeder, and both land like compliments because nobody has praised her for anything in a […]
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Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison
She has been dead for roughly a hundred years, and she still drinks her water. She still has a doughnut for breakfast and the occasional cigarette after dinner, even though her body requires none of it. And she holds on to these small habits deliberately, because they are the last human things she has left, […]