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Lepucki’s post-apocalypse novel
What if? Edan Lepucki’s California conjectures a fictional future. California by Edan Lepucki. Little, Brown and Company (Hachette Book Group), 393 pp., $26.00. Guest Review by Lanie Tankard “The...
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Novel as waking dream
[Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera expresses a similar nostalgia.] Haruki Murakami constructs human drama on a railway platform. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by...
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Icy Nordic memories
Per Petterson’s tale of boyhood friendship and adult reckoning. I Refuse by Per Petterson. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, $24.00 hardcover (296 pages), April 7, 2015. Translator: Don Bartlett. Cover...
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Excavating the margins
[Getty Images-Peter Macdiarmid.] Ander Monson’s library ephemera spur provocative literary essays. Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in...
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Tiny libraries
Margret Aldrich’s tale of neighborhood watering holes for the mind. The Little Free Library Book: Take a Book, Return a Book by Margret Aldrich Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, $25.00 hardcover...
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Guides to craft & style
Nota bene, writers! New and updated books for wordsmiths. Steering the Craft, 2nd ed. A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt....
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A Mexican bard
Wit & wisdom punctuate Daniel Sada’s novel of love’s charade. One Out of Two by Daniel Sada Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, $16.00 paperback (112 pages), November 3, 2015. Translator: Katherine...
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The complexity of purity
Jonathan Franzen spotlights spotlessness in his epic of the zeitgeist. [Taken at the Guinness brewery, Dublin, Ireland, @Richard Gilbert.]Purity by Jonathan Franzen New York: Farrar, Straus, and...
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Booking passage out
[Ta-Nehisi Coates pictured in The New Yorker. Photo by Stephen Voss/Redux.] Ta-Nehisi Coates explains race to his son, trying to grasp it himself. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. New...
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What has gone missing?
Two writers assess the electronic era in fiction and nonfiction. Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age by Sven Birkerts. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, $16.00 paperback original...
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