Celeste Ng imagines a present-day—or near present-day—dystopia in Our Missing Hearts, where a wrenching economic depression in the U.S. has revved up government surveillance of its own citizens to a fever of paranoia. Ng’s portrayal of this America recalls Stalin’s Soviet Union where citizens are rewarded for informing on neighbors. And for good measure she overlays that chilling memory with the contemporaneous and sinister ethnic hatred which infected Nazi Germany. This is the ghastly backdrop...
December 03, 2022
"Dinosaurs" by Lydia Millet
Prior to the events of Lydia Millet’s novel Dinosaurs, Gil sells his Madison Avenue flat and walks…that’s correct, walks, to his new home in Phoenix. This epic journey on foot comes, in the fullness of skilled storytelling, to represent the realignment of a man with the unimaginably ancient streams of life. Without exaggerating, he finds his soul, which at story’s outset, he has abandoned. The stunning and highly enjoyable dénouement of this lovely novel portrays Gil’s rebirth and re-occupation...
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