Book Reviews

  • Note to Self

    Note to Self by Connor Franta is an intimate and disarmingly honest collection of personal essays and reflections from one of YouTube’s most beloved creators — a young man writing with courage and vulnerability about identity, mental health, creativity, and the strange experience of growing up in public. About the Book Connor Franta rose to…

  • Bright Dead Things

    Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things arrives like a letter written in the aftermath of a life’s reshuffling — a book about moving from New York City to Kentucky, about love and horses and grief and the strange wildness that persists in the body even as the mind tries to settle down. It is Limón’s fourth…

  • Detroit 1967

    Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies by Joel Stone is a fascinating and essential history that places the explosive events of July 1967 within the full arc of Detroit’s social, racial, and economic transformation. About the Book The summer of 1967 brought five days of civil unrest to Detroit that left 43 people dead, more than…

  • Heart Berries

    Heart Berries: A Memoir, published by Counterpoint Press in 2018, is the kind of book that arrives without much warning and changes what you thought a memoir could do. Terese Marie Mailhot wrote it while receiving treatment for PTSD and bipolar disorder at a psychiatric facility, drafting it first as letters to her therapist, then…

  • What My Body Remembers

    What My Body Remembers by Agnete Friis is a harrowing and deeply humane psychological thriller that follows a young mother with post-traumatic stress disorder as she fights to protect her son and uncover the truth about a violent past she cannot fully access — a crime novel that takes the interior life of trauma as…

  • The Story of the Lost Child

    Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child brings the Neapolitan Novels to a close with the same unrelenting honesty that made the series one of the defining literary events of the decade. This fourth and final volume follows Elena (Lenù) and Lila across middle age and into old age, their friendship as knotted and…

  • Maximum Volume

    Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin by Kenneth Womack is a compelling and meticulously researched biography that reveals the full measure of one of popular music’s most consequential figures. About the Book Kenneth Womack’s biography of George Martin—the producer, arranger, and fifth Beatle whose work shaped the sound of the most influential…

  • United States of Japan

    United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas is a bold, viscerally imagined alternate history thriller set in a world where Japan won World War II — a novel that combines the paranoid atmosphere of Philip K. Dick with the propulsive energy of a noir action film, and arrives at something entirely its own. About the…

  • Freshwater

    Freshwater, published by Grove Press in 2018, is the debut novel of Akwaeke Emezi, and it announces a singular literary intelligence with a force that few first books manage. The novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian woman born at the intersection of worlds, carrying inside her the ogbanje – spirits from Igbo cosmology who exist…