Category: Book Review

One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing. He doesn’t immediately understand that it’s a bullet at all, and it’s only luck that it…

I read (and write) a lot of poetry. Some poems are an exotic hor’doeuvre, some are a rich and fanciful desert. Ricardo Blanco’s poems (I prefer the Spanish) are a full course dinner of steak…

What if I told you that someone walking the earth in present day Manhattan in the year 2200 had no idea there once a place named New York City? Imagine they had no idea of…

Have you ever looked up what happened on your birthday? What were the biggest news events? What lead the news at 6:00? Who else shares the birthday with you? Who died? Was someone of note…

She would walk along that basement corridor for another twenty-six years, each day cut and folded by the belief that just beyond the museum’s worn paths and daily rituals, there lies the possibility of something…

TEN years ago I volunteered as an English as a Foreign Language tutor for a refugee resettlement agency in central Pennsylvania. During that time I worked with a Christian Karen family from south-eastern Myanmar*: father,…

In a spin on Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Booker-Prize winning author Ian McEwan has created a world in which a cockroach has transitioned into a man, and this man has the control of the British…

Recently, BookBrowse sent me a copy of a short story collection by “one of America’s best kept secrets”: Lucia Berlin’s Evening In Paradise: More Stories. Berlin evokes Shirley Jackson (minus the gothic vibes) and Raymond…

Ada Limón’s ​The Carrying introduces a deeply personal collection of poems and is recognized as her boldest work yet. Unlike Bright Dead Things, the National Book Award finalist ​which examines the ideals of a youthful…

LET’S start with a confession: I am a historian and I have never read Gilgamesh. I didn’t read it in graduate school. I didn’t read it in college. I didn’t even read an excerpt in…