At the beginning of March, I was determined to keep my nose in a stack of backlisted books. Books like these are the kind that to keep my focus on my own shelves in this reading year. Chad Pelley’s Every Little Thing (2013) “Every day, every hour, really, it was a
Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans (2014) Bond Street Books - Random House, 2014 It’s risky, fragmenting narration into a large number of voices, but it’s the perfect format for a novel about the experiences of newcomers to the United States, who can have an astonishing variety
In collection reading, since Quarterly Stories: Winter 2013 I've read Susie Moloney's Things Withered, the latest installment of the Alice Munro reading project, B.J. Novak's One More Thing, and the most recent volume of Journey Prize stories. But mostly I've been dipping into single stories in recent months. Partly this was inspired by random samplings of the latest ReLit
Admittedly, I chose There's an Owl in the Shower because I had read Jean Craighead George's classic My Side of the Mountain. I knew of her reputation for including ecological and environmental themes in the stories she has written for children. But when I realized that it had been published in
A novel about a woman who becomes obsessed with a novel? Europa Editions, 2011 Just the sort of story which is guaranteed to appeal to a voracious (even, at times, overly excitable) reader. Even if the novel with which the main character is obsessed is Robert Louis Stevenson's
