A lifelong East Ender who fought in gangs as a boy and whose mother was killed when a German bomb dropped on their house, 45-year-old Harryboy Boas resides in a small room in a scruffy boardinghouse, sleeps with prostitutes, and prides himself on his reading acumen (“This Zola is a terrific writer. He can be […]
A talented guitarist, Melody Li arrives in Cassette City with her walls up and her headphones firmly on—but this analog town has other plans. A mushroom named Taki and a green raccoon called Snackwich will need help if they want to win the Battle of the Bands. Though Melody’s a loner, she’s eager to bring […]
Following an award-winning memoir, fiction for adults and children, a two-volume history of Canada, and 12 Canadian National Magazine Awards, Gillmor shows he has yet another trick up his sleeve. His first crime novel is narrated by police detective Jamieson Abel, a white law school dropout who gets along with exactly nobody on the corrupt […]
Hannah “Cookie” Cooke is a New England–based interior designer whose two specialties are constructing painstaking scale models of crime scenes like the Lizzie Borden house, which doesn’t pay much, and restoring upscale houses, which pays a lot more. Her business, the Ministry of the Interior, gets a commission from neurosurgeon Chuck Halsey and his wife, […]
Bigsby met the playwright in the 1960s, founded the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia in 1989, and has written extensively about his life and work, so his questions throughout the book are knowledgeable, though there’s little new here. The devastating impact of the Great Depression is a constant […]
The narrative focuses on the “brilliant, eccentric, unsettlingly precise” Gödel, a figure whom the author, in an introduction, compares to Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin and describes as not only a mathematician, but also a “philosopher of mystery” who found new puzzles in settled certainties. “In any system that’s powerful enough to talk about arithmetic,” […]
Before Princess Roselyn the Reticent can articulate what she needs, her parents (the king and queen) and the people of her kingdom anticipate it for her. “Was that a speck of dirt? ‘Run a bath for the princess!’” And when they think she wants a treat? Time for “ALL THE ICE CREAM IN THE LAND.” […]
Trip’s baseball roots run deep: His dad’s team won the Little League championship when he was 12, and Grandpa was a minor-league ballplayer. Trip is well aware of the family legacy of baseball, but he feels the heavy expectation to achieve and struggles to carve out a legacy of his own. After his father, who’s […]
Laura is lucky—she’s recently received a Young Artists Grant to write her novel, right on the edge of turning 30. No one she remembers from high school writing classes or graduate humanities classes is making a living by writing. Despite her grant, Laura takes on odd jobs like teaching high school writing workshops. For 85 […]
Historian Goldman’s ambitious book takes a detailed dive into New York City over 10 years. He begins on New Year’s Eve in 1919, describing people partying before Prohibition took hold in this “consummate metropolis” and “home of modernity.” In 1920, the Gotham Book and Art bookstore was born at 128 West 45th Street. That same […]