Colum McCann’s first person narrator in Songdogs, named Conor, goes on a quest to understand his parents and perhaps find his long-estranged mother. This trip is not trivial in terms of miles covered — it takes him from hot, dusty Mexican towns, to a forest ranger lookout above the tree line in Idaho, to his windswept native Ireland — nor is it lacking for vivid colors, diverting characters, or a discussion of the long-standing grievances between his parents. His trek is absorbing, at times frustrating,...
March 15, 2025
"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead takes us on an unforgettable ride in The Underground Railroad. He displays the horrific cruelty endemic to the America's Peculiar Institution, and shows how it and violent oppression ruled the relationship between blacks and whites during the first half of the 19th Century. Never ending spirals of hope and defeat put these rails on a roller coaster; it’s a vivid, gritty, honest, and ultimately awe-inspiring travail.We witness the life-and-death flight of Cora, a Georgia slave...
March 11, 2025
"Loom in the Loft" by Jay Black
In his novella Loom in the Loft, Jay Black presents the bildungsroman of a young but precocious boy n the Canadian province of Ontario who comes under the spell of a beautiful neighbor woman. This calculating person takes advantage of his innocence and through no effort of her own, reaps a windfall far greater than she could ever have imagined—or deserved. It’s a spare but promising piece from a writer whose poems in English and French have won multiple awards.Protagonist Drew is a pubescent...
March 10, 2025
"The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald
Translated from the German by Michael Hulse.W.G. Sebald eschews character and plot and barely has a unifying framework for his 1998 novel The Rings of Saturn. Instead of these orthodox fictional features, he spends his ten chapters describing his endless walks around Suffolk near the east coast of England. During his peregrinations he considers a range of intriguing topics in the most engaging and evocative language I have read in a very long time. The Rings of Saturn is inspired, wide-ranging,...
February 28, 2025
"Contrary" by Laury A. Egan
In Contrary Laury A. Egan trains her unforgiving eye on some of the 21st Century’s worst features. She takes up toxic childrearing practices; the dicey work of maintaining relationships in the Queer spectrum; the haughty, insular views of the wealthy class; and, among others, the isolation and confusion of older citizens beginning to lose their mental acuity. Through it all she yolks her comprehensive understanding of people’s emotional journeys, and treats her characters and her readers with...
February 16, 2025
"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner
In her latest novel, Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner treats us to a cynical, shifty first-person protagonist who must pursue her work using a series of assumed names. One thing on this job that diverts her: a series of email missives from a onetime Paris radical (now retired from trying to overthrow governments) who tries to guide a group of younger, sort-of like-minded activists in rural southwest France. The emails are long and full of philosophical and scientific reflections; as part of her...
February 08, 2025
"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga
Translated from the Dutch by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich MammitzschJohan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a professor of history at the University of Leiden from 1915 until the Nazis closed the university in 1942 and held him hostage until shortly before his death. He first published The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919; this book represents a translation of 1921’s second edition. The current translators, both from the University of Western Washington, cite problems with the first translation into...
January 18, 2025
"Cancelled" by Danny King
I am going to preface this review with the thought that most of my readers know what “cancel culture” is. If you’re fortunate enough to be fuzzy on the concept, it involves the willful defamation and ostracization of a person who may or may not have made a statement offensive to self-righteous observers who lurk on the internet. These observer/judgers bloviate from their self-assigned “high ground.” By and large, these cowards operate in the toxic space of a fully public forum, while maintaining...
January 04, 2025
"The Sumerians" by Samuel Noah Kramer
In The Sumerians (1963) Samuel Noah Kramer cites the “unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit” of the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These attributes allowed them to be the first people ever to build a complex society as we would recognize it today, to dwell in cities, to turn arid land into lush, productive farmland, and as a result successfully to store excess grain. And most sweeping and transformational of all, they developed...
January 01, 2025
"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s...
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