Connecting Thread: From Secrecy to Corruption (3 of 5)

2021-12-27T15:23:02-05:00

Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it

Connecting Thread: From Secrecy to Corruption (3 of 5)2021-12-27T15:23:02-05:00

Connecting Thread: From Revolution to Secrecy (2 of 5)

2021-12-27T14:57:43-05:00

Picking up yesterday's thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at

Connecting Thread: From Revolution to Secrecy (2 of 5)2021-12-27T14:57:43-05:00

Autumn 2021: In My Reading Log (Part Two)

2021-10-06T15:57:52-04:00

Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves. In the opening story of

Autumn 2021: In My Reading Log (Part Two)2021-10-06T15:57:52-04:00

Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People

2020-10-22T12:21:33-04:00

It begins with something extraordinary. "Almost a decade earlier, a man with a .45-70 Marlin hunting rifle walked through the front doors of Avalon Hills prep school. He didn't know that he was about to become a living symbol of the age of white men shooting into crowds." House

Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People2020-10-22T12:21:33-04:00

Bloody Summer 2016, In My Reading Log

2016-07-19T11:15:27-04:00

Massacre, killer, murder: when these words appear on a novel's first page, readers are fore-warned. And, yet, the first third of Sara Taylor's Boring Girls (2015) is a coming-of-age story. "It was becoming more and more apparent that I had been right all along. No one could truly understand me, unless they got

Bloody Summer 2016, In My Reading Log2016-07-19T11:15:27-04:00
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