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 […]
Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s […]
Few writers have seen their work reinterpreted as much as Jane Austen’s. “We all encounter Austen differently and from the position of where and when we read her,” writes the scholar Jennie Batchelor in the book’s introduction. “How we read her changes as the world changes around us.” This anthology, a melange of fiction, poetry, […]
Every scenario seems implausible until it actually happens, as any military planner knows. When newspaper reporter Carmela Jean “CJ” Martino and her new husband, Lt. Joe Delano of the U.S. Marine Corps, get married in Waikiki on December 5, 1941, the pace of Japanese aggression feels distant, at best. CJ is more concerned about what […]
McLoof gathers 10 roughly 10-page stories that begin with a reference to an actual 2023 New York Times piece on Midland Park, New Jersey, a slow-paced, multigenerational “Forever Town” an hour from New York City. The narrator reads something ominous into that description and rewinds to 1994, when, at age 10, he attends his town’s […]
Festooned with daisies, an orange-and-yellow-striped bus with bee wings attached to its top and a license plate that reads “HOP2IT” pulls up to the corner on a rainy spring day. Who is the driver? A dapper bunny, of course. Mills’ text breaks into a familiar tune: “One hoppity bus goes SPLISH and SPLASH, / SPLISH […]
This freewheeling tour of human history and psychic life—by a professor of political science at the University of Chicago—invites us to think about our inner beings. The human “self” is no real thing out there, Oliver argues, but rather a complex construction of social, religious, and political institutions. The ancient Greek dictum, “know thyself,” really […]
With numerous series titles under their belt—among them If Animals Kissed Good Night (2007), If Animals Said I Love You (2017), and If Animals Loved Books (2025)—the creators take the theme in a different direction, geographically speaking, focusing on Australian natives. A wombat, a striped orange cat, a koala, a quokka, a kookaburra, a magpie, […]
When she was a baby, Naomi Ward was kidnapped from a grocery store. Over a decade later, the woman who took and raised her was arrested and imprisoned. Now, 16-year-old Naomi has been reunited with her family, who know her as Camryn Stoakes. Her parents try to make the homecoming as smooth as possible, but […]
This wonderful book is a powerful reminder that moral clarity can improve the world. As a boy, Lawson had a “transcendent” experience: “a voice beyond myself” forbid him from responding to racist taunts with violence. Thus began his lifelong commitment to nonviolence, which guided his work as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and […]