BOOKLOVES

Stories bouncing between reality and unreality, paired with abstract artworks, result in a unified, surprisingly accessible collection. This slim but consistently satisfying volume contains just five stories, making it viable to include a few words on each.  It begins with a dignified alderman obliging an odd request that puts him in what might be deemed […]

“In the Wake of the Ruined” begins with its heroine crawling out of the sea on all fours, dragging a dead king’s sword and a dead king’s crown, with a hole in her middle packed with kelp and blood-soaked sand. She has kept herself alive by paying a price she does not fully understand yet. […]

There is a particular kind of romance heroine we have all met before. She comes home from something terrible, she flinches, she whispers, and she waits for a good man to coax her back into the world. Into the Fading Twilight by Catherine Cowles takes that woman, hands her a mountain bike, and shoves her […]

There is a scene early on where a hockey player, sitting on a hospital bed ninety seconds after a doctor tells him his career might be over, makes a crude joke about his own anatomy. The woman in the corner of the room, who barely tolerates him, calls him on it. She tells him he […]

A compelling exploration of enlightenment as both liberation and an insidious form of erasure The Great Awakening by Blake Anderson is a speculative novel about a global phenomenon in which entire populations experience what appears to be a shared near-death or spiritual awakening. After this event, many people wake up transformed by a new sense […]

Some novels talk to you quietly at first, the way a good neighbor does over a fence, and then, before you have noticed, have walked you all the way into the woods. That is the trick Country People by Daniel Mason pulls off. It opens with a family crossing the country in a station wagon […]