Mo Melnick wants nothing more out of life than to plop down on his beach chair every day and rent umbrellas to Jersey Shore visitors. But Johnny Clay has a different idea about how Mo should spend his admittedly limited energy. Johnny wants to gather the members of the long-disbanded rock group Sunshine Apocalypse for […]
Jasmine Morgan has gotten to where she is as a PR strategist because she’s good at her job, and, up until now, there’s been no sign of that changing. However, when she’s given a project involving the revitalization of a small Florida town, it’s made clear that she has competition in the form of her […]
One of Natalie Olsen’s two best friends died of cancer. Now she stands at the bedside of the other, Cara, who’s been left in a coma with little brain activity by a super-strong date-rape drug. Cara left a club with a stranger and was found unconscious at a bus stop. Another woman is in the […]
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 […]
Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, […]
Being stuck at work on her birthday seems fitting for Nora Bird, whose special day has felt marked by death since the untimely demise of both her parents on the same day 18 years earlier, when she was 8. It’s all the more fitting because Nora’s work is quite literally the work of death. Like […]
Convinced that the original investigation five years ago got it all wrong, New Zealander Drew Jamieson wants Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit to look more closely into the death of his brother, hotel manager Tom Jamieson, whose fatal tumble down Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps was ruled an accident. Using a computer image search, Drew claims to […]
“I still can’t believe I wrote and published an essay collection spurred solely by my love for reading.” Readers of this book might feel the same way. Filled with breathless pleasure, this clutch of essays by Korean author Hwang (Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, 2022) hovers between the trite and the profound. Big books take […]
National Geographic writer Shea has traveled throughout the far north and illuminates it with an emphasis on climate change. He concentrates on lands from northern Canada to Norway, which are warming three or four times more rapidly than temperate regions. The heat is destroying the Arctic cryosphere—sea ice, snow, permafrost, weather patterns, and ocean currents […]
Too often, lyrics collections can be little more than keepsakes for fans, easily thrown together and presented without any context or new material. That was never going to be the case for Darnielle—the indie folk musician has always had a strong literary bent, as evidenced by his three well-received novels, Wolf in White Van (2014), […]