Book Reviews

  • Don’t Call Us Dead

    Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith is a devastating and luminous collection that confronts Black death, queer desire, and the search for a world beyond violence with breathtaking lyrical urgency. About the Book Danez Smith’s second full-length collection opens with a sequence that imagines an afterlife specifically for Black boys killed by police—a heaven…

  • The Sting of the Wild

    The Sting of the Wild by Justin O. Schmidt is a singularly entertaining and scientifically rigorous tour through the world of venomous insects — a book that only the world’s foremost expert on insect pain could write, and one that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely illuminating about evolution, ecology, and the natural…

  • The 1916 Irish Rebellion

    The 1916 Irish Rebellion by Hilary Pyle is a stunning visual and narrative account of the Easter Rising that transformed Ireland forever — a meticulously researched and gorgeously produced volume that brings one of the pivotal moments in modern history to vivid, unforgettable life. About the Book Published to coincide with the centenary of the…

  • Her Body and Other Parties

    Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a striking debut collection that reimagines the female body as a site of horror, desire, and defiant mythmaking. About the Book Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection arrives as one of the most celebrated works of speculative short fiction in recent memory. Spanning eight stories, the…

  • Night Sky with Exit Wounds

    Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong is a debut poetry collection of such ferocious beauty and emotional precision that it announced one of the most important voices in American literature — a book where grief, war, sexuality, and tenderness collide in language that feels both ancient and utterly new. About the Book Ocean…

  • Do Not Say We Have Nothing

    Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien is an achingly beautiful epic that braids together the fates of Chinese families across three generations, from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square massacre, proving that music, memory, and love endure even when history demands silence. About the Book Set across decades and continents, Do…

  • Stargazing

    Jen Wang’s 2020 Meridian Award-winning middle-grade graphic novel follows Christine and Moon, two Chinese-American girls in a Southern California suburb whose unlikely friendship navigates class difference, faith, and adolescent belonging. Warm, precise, and quietly profound, Stargazing is one of the standout graphic novels for young readers of its era.

  • We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

    Joy McCullough’s 2020 Meridian Award-winning YA novel in verse weaves two narratives together: Em processing her brother’s acquittal for sexual assault, and the 15th-century French noblewoman Marguerite de Bressieux who sought justice after her own assault. Formally ambitious and emotionally unsparing, We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is one of the most important young adult books of its era.