Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette, a fabulist tale of a mother who becomes pregnant with an unusual child, is a fascinating debut that breaks genre conventions of all sorts. The novel begins with the narrator, Tiny, a professional cellist, disclosing that she has had an affair with her owl-lover, a companion from her youth, and she now… Continue reading Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
Category: Fiction
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s 2018 debut, is a coming of age story set against the onset of the digital age, in other words the novel’s protagonist is coming of age with our modern world. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, has arrived at Harvard for her freshmen year in the 1990s, armed with a love… Continue reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff brings readers back to the Middle Ages in her new novel, Matrix, a fiction loosely created around the life of the twelfth century nun and poet, Marie de France. In Groff’s novel, Marie is an 17 year old orphan, deemed unfit for marriage because she is a “great clumsy lunk” with a “giant… Continue reading Matrix by Lauren Groff
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Reading Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, felt like the culmination of the many years of hype and interest surrounding her work, it’s the rare novel that builds upon the themes of the writer’s previous work in all of the best ways. The novel centers on Alice Kelleher, a successful Irish novelist… Continue reading Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Maggie Shipstead’s Booker Prize long-listed novel, Great Circle, is an impossibly wide-reaching piece of historical fiction that totally defies any effort to summarize briefly. The novel’s twin threads focus on two women living totally different lives: first, there’s Marian Graves, an orphan who survived a great tragedy in her infancy and grew up to become… Continue reading Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Virtue by Hermione Hoby
Humans have been attempting to answer the question of what a good and virtuous life looks like since the beginning of time. In her sophomore novel, Virtue, Hermione Hoby takes on this very same concern, contextualized within the Trump era. The novel centers on Luca, a young man trying to distance himself from his middle… Continue reading Virtue by Hermione Hoby
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Marketed as “The Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out,” Zakiya Dalila Harris’ new thriller novel, The Other Black Girl, has been one of the publishing industry’s most talked-about and buzziest releases of 2021. Harris, who quit her job as an editorial assistant at the revered PRH imprint Knopf to write this book, has endeavored to… Continue reading The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Since moving to Italy in 2011, Jhumpa Lahiri has entered a new phase in her writing career. Her new novel, Whereabouts, which she wrote in Italian and translated into English herself, is a far cry from her 2003 debut novel, The Namesake, and her early fiction centering on the lives of South Asian immigrants. But… Continue reading Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor revisits the world of young people in academic settings struggling to keep it together while fracturing internally in his sophomore effort, the short fiction collection, Filthy Animals. Lionel, who appears in five of the eleven stories in this collection, somewhat resembles Wallace, the protagonist from Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life. Both are black… Continue reading Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Maríana Enriquez
Maríana Enriquez’s story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, published in Argentina in 2009 but translated into English in 2020, leans into the macabre and imbues the horror genre with cultural specificity. Most of the stories are set in or around Buenos Aires, and many involve both spiritual phenomenon like local folklore and Afro-Brazilian… Continue reading The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Maríana Enriquez