BOOKLOVES

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

An empowering novel about finding purpose in the aftermath of a decades-long crumbling marriage Rachel has no complaints. In the suburbs of Southern California, she and Jeremy have managed to send their two children to college while maintaining their beautiful, cookie-cutter home and fairytale love story.  Rachel’s domestic bliss implodes, however, on the evening of […]

A young soldier is taken down a maze of stairs into a windowless room beneath a desert military base. There is a drain in the floor. One wall is a sheet of dark glass with a spout set into the middle of it. She is told to stand on the drain, cross her arms over […]

A self-help playbook that encourages daily practice with approachable, optimistic guidance Author Karin Kiser is no stranger to the self-help genre, and her experience is evident in her newest offering, Happiness Unleashed: Your 90-Day Playbook for a Life of Meaning and Happiness that Lasts, where she emphasizes a daily practice of “mood boosters” and “pattern […]

At a day care on an ordinary residential street, the children are out on the playground at dawn. They climb the ladder, go down the slide, and climb the ladder again, and every one of them is crying while they do it. One has been sick down the front of his jacket and is still […]