Category: Books

Thom Stead couldn’t get the crocodile right. He ended up making the reptile out of clay, then pitching it. It took weeks for an “aha moment” to rear its head. And that moment? Thom lives for it. Stead recreates book covers and posts them on his Instagram account, readbooks.servelooks. And

Fleishman Is in Trouble is a novel about marriage that opens with divorce. Toby Fleishman divorced a harridan. A social climbing, shallow, money-obsessed, whip yielding succubus. During fights, Rachel Fleishman “went for Toby’s masculinity like it was an artery.” As an unattached doctor at a major New York City hospital,

Cliches are, is more like it. I wasn’t going to review Chances Are by Richard Russo. Cuz I thought I hated it. But, as my husband pointed out (“You sure can’t stop talking about or put down that book you don’t like.”), my feelings towards this book are more complicated

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert is imbued with sex and death. These are Heavy Topics worthy of Heavy Novels, yet, Gilbert’s latest goes down like a beach read. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote City of Girls shortly after losing her best friend-turned-romantic-partner Rayya Elias to cancer, making the books’ levity more

All The Rage and Fed Up made me both think and seethe. The idea that women do more labor in the home than men is not a new one. Though words like emotional labor or women’s mental load are more recent, they’re not new, either. The books All The Rage:

Paperback Crush is the best book I’ve ever read ever. Paperback Crush has reduced me to the platitudes and extremes of my seventh-grade self, as it contains every book, character, and series 7-13 year-old-me loved. Remembering and revisiting this era in Gabrielle Moss’ ultimate guide to “pre-Twilight” Young Adult fiction was

Thom Jones is a recent discovery of mine. And I’m all sorts of irritated about the delay. I was eight when Thom Jones rose to acclaim, what’s your excuse? Naw, I’m mostly joking. I’m just feeling salty because I’ve wasted so much of my life not reading him. His descriptions

Zoje Stage takes the electra complex to another level in Baby Teeth. In this article I explore whether this novel adds anything worthwhile to the burgeoning genre of “creepy kids.” Of course, parenting is a joy. It’s also costly, sleepless, and full of anxiety. The whole experience can bring up

How are you doing, Mr. Murakami? I finished Killing Commendatore last week. It’s classic you: narrated by a milquetoast,  jazz-loving, Everyman who just happens to fall in with some weird stuff. References to music, art, and breasts abound. The Great Gatsby was more than a reference in this book, huh? Critics

Unexpected Health Crusader Genius Foods was not the book Max Lugavere expected to write. He was hoping for a Seacrest-esque rise to fame in the first decade of the 2000’s. Majoring in film and psychology, Max went on to host and produce stories for a popular socially conscious TV network. He never