“The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.” With that opening sentence, Stonex plunges us into the mind and world of Bridget “Birdie” Keller, a wife and mother in the rural countryside of Wiltshire, England. But Birdie’s world is not quite so tranquil: 18 years earlier, a man was […]
Journalist and author Cohen, author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, strikes gold with a story from Victorian Britain that comes with a scholar’s favorite documentation: court transcripts. In 1883 a wealthy Australian bought a used yacht in Britain and hired a crew to deliver it: an experienced […]
The author opens the book with a series of devastating events that occurred to people in the author’s inner circle that made him realize that “life can be more than mere survival.” Survival mode, he writes, is an “emergency response system” that may manifest as irritability, procrastination, or simply becoming numb. By contrast, thriving is […]
If the unnamed narrator of Tokarczuk’s latest novel appears to bear certain similarities to Tokarczuk herself—an abiding interest in mushrooms and astrology, say—that’s neither here nor there. The novel is set in a remote Polish village close to the Czech border: so close to the border, in fact, that when a visiting German tourist suddenly […]
This first entry in a new series opens with Violet encountering Miller one summer night—he’s taking a walk, and she looks out her bedroom window and spots him in the moonlight. Wealthy Violet, a self-described nerd, becomes a friend and safe haven for aspiring musician Miller, who’s living in a car with his mother. The […]
In this second installment of the author’s fantasy series, teenager Timothy Brennan continues to deal with the recent discovery that he is not a human; rather, he is an elf with some talents of the sídhe, or fairies. In the previous entry, Timothy learned of the existence of elves and his place in their society—he […]
“Delaware may be small, but its criminal history contains multitudes,” writes Tabler at the outset of his narrative of the Diamond State’s seamy underbelly. “These stories span a spectrum—from blood-chilling murders that haunted generations to curious capers lost in dusty archives, from soul-crushing injustices that demanded reform to schemes so preposterous they strain credulity.” Tabler […]
The author was raised in Lamesa, in the endless flat plains of West Texas. He describes himself as a typical, hard-working kid. As a teenager, he discovered a talent for broadcasting as a DJ on local radio and honed his skills through his college years at the University of Texas at Austin, after which he […]
Pinkham, a Cornell University scholar, writes that trees in Russia, which make up roughly one-fifth of the world’s forests, lie at the heart of Russian culture—“a symbol of what is good and what must be preserved, the last bulwark against annihilation.” Most Russian histories begin with medieval Kiev, the first Slavic state, and move north […]
As Sampson reflects in a pardonable understatement, “Bad things have happened to the Cross family before.” So what’s left to suffer now that Sampson has rescued Cross from a near-fatal bullet wound? Glad you asked. When his son Damon’s academic advisor phones from Chapel Hill to report that nobody’s seen Damon for three days, Cross […]