Years before Manisha, the protagonist of 2024’s A Drop of Venom, met monster slayer Pratyush, her older sister, Eshani, made a secret trade with the shades, exchanging her life to ensure the survival of her fellow naga. Hiran, the brooding Gatekeeper of the Nightmare Realm, whose spirited sister, Holika, can manipulate dreams, has repeatedly appeared […]
New York Times journalist Watkins writes with exactitude and compassion, digging deeply in archives to capture a high-stakes tale that played out internationally during the early 1970s, when the Northern Irish sectarian war against British domination (the Troubles) was at its brutal extreme. While the Provisional IRA received a new generation of recruits due to […]
The story begins by likening words to people: specifically, the way each word is unique and lovely just the way it is. Every word does something no other word can, and when different words meet, “Words are like kids / Who see each other / And begin to play.” The author underscores the anxiety words […]
The German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) remains famous today for his Marxist critiques of popular culture as well as for a prose style as intricately knotty as a macrame vest. Among his most characteristically memorable pronouncements was this: “The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture […]
Walking the streets, the young narrator proclaims, “I come from the City of Jasmine…where sweet scents dance in the wind, filling air, calming hearts.” Statements that begin with the phrase “I come from” introduce descriptions of other locations, among them the Umayyad Mosque, Qala’at Dimashq (the Citadel of Damascus), and the oasis of Ghouta—all of […]
Aulkendale City, known as “the Sore of the Southern Continent,” is home to drinking establishments, wealthy nobles, and a red tent community of vagrants and outcasts. Phyllis, who later goes by Phillip, has an uncanny, unexplained ability to snatch people’s body parts without killing them. The angsty 17-year-old usually runs around with Lucent, a nearly-400-year-old […]
Karl Marx, historian Hartman writes, was fascinated by the U.S. as “the nation most committed to the economic and social systems formed by capitalism.” He had fleeting hope that his concept of freedom as encompassing economic independence would find a home in the U.S., even as Abraham Lincoln—who, casual readers might not know, was the […]
Perhaps not since Nathan Hill’s The Nix (2016) have we seen a debut as hugely ambitious as this one, pulling out all the stops to tell a unique version of the American story. Though there are more characters, more subplots, and just plain more than can be outlined here, the novel revolves around a miserable […]
Lewis and Richardson, both of the British Museum, were inspired to assemble this book by the BBC TV series Digging for Britain, which describes the exploits of two English hobbyists who scour the countryside with their metal detectors. Readers will not regret looking it up. Organic objects decay (mostly); stone and bone survive; metals are […]
Seven years after saving McKenzie’s life, Angela Bjork has a request. She’d like him to track down the Ankylosaurus skull valued at $6 million that was taken from a dig she was working near Powderville, Montana, before it had even been completely cleaned. Dr. Nicholas Larsen, the University of Minnesota professor who’s one of the […]