BOOKLOVES

The balloon comes down at sunrise. It has been drifting all night with three children curled in the bottom of a small wicker basket painted with stars and stripes, and now the ground is rushing up to meet it: church towers, red roofs, a wide stone plaza where a crowd is gathering to stare. The […]

A celebration of curiosity, conversation, and the joy of learning There are books that tell stories, books that present arguments, and books that document lives. Letters 2 Lance occupies a rather more unusual space. Across two substantial volumes, Jack Dunsmoor constructs an extended correspondence that is at once memoir, travelogue, reading journal, historical reflection, philosophical […]

An impassioned manifesto on human creativity, intelligence, and ambition Intelligence isn’t just about retaining facts. In this ambitious, deeply thought-provoking work, author Scott Hadley Morgan divulges that it’s about observation, art, expanding the mind, and using the tools at your disposal without overusing them. Accelerating Intelligence is an expansive book on the nature of intelligence. […]

The bathroom is small, tiled and loud. Somebody has turned on every tap, and the water drums into the tub while two men sit close together and talk under the noise. One is a major in the KGB, a big, restless Russian who once played in a Moscow rock band. The other is a young […]

It is a quiet Tuesday that has turned busy without warning. A small wine bar in Hobart is short one staff member, every table is full, and a nervous junior sommelier is carrying too many glasses. They hit the floor. She bursts into tears. For a second the whole room stops, the owner included, standing […]

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 […]