The New York Times Book Review – April 2, 2023:
“Birnam Wood,” by the Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, is a fast-moving ecological novel and a generational cri de coeur.
Edinburgh calls to readers, its pearl-grey skies urging them to curl up with a book. Maggie O’Farrell, the author of “Hamnet,” suggests reading that best reflects her city.
The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023:
Her new story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” offers elegiac scenes from a marriage plus a grab bag of curious fables.
There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we’re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it’s Margaret Atwood.
Michael Lesy’s book of historical photographs and found text offers a singular portrait of American life.
Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.
The first installment of an essay series on American literature and faith.
I am a child of the church. In an early memory, I am 6 years old, half-asleep in the back of my grandparents’ station wagon on the way home from a revival…
Boomers Daily 