In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist tries to makes sense of her family’s unraveling
Yaa Gyasi’s new novel Transcendent Kingdom confronts the venerable question of whether science or religion better reveals the truth about life’s enduring mysteries. Theological questions such as the origin of…
In Lee Conell’s The Party Upstairs, a father and daughter struggle to find their places in stratified Manhattan
Martin and Ruby, the father-daughter tandem at the center of Lee Conell’s debut novel, The Party Upstairs, live below ground level but don’t at first resemble literature’s famous basement dwellers….
W.M. Akers returns to his mythical Jazz Age New York City, where time is out of joint
W.M. Akers’ Westside Saints is inundated with death, but that doesn’t keep it from being lively. In the opening scenes of the book (a sequel to his 2019 debut novel…
Penelope Lemon returns in Operation Dimwit
When last we saw our heroine, at the end of Inman Majors’ Penelope Lemon: Game On!, life had finally become manageable. With a steady job keeping creditors at bay and…
David Madden’s inventive biography details the writing life of an American noir master
…era Cain didn’t meet was Ernest Hemingway, the writer to whom he was most often compared. Madden, a native Tennessean and distinguished writer of fiction and non-fiction, does not hide…
In Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, a young AIDS patient encounters bigotry when he returns to his hometown in Ohio
Carter Sickels’ novel The Prettiest Star begins in April 1986 when 24-year-old Brian Jackson, suffering from advanced-stage AIDS, leaves New York and returns to his hometown of Chester, Ohio. Six…
