The late Alan Watts is an important figure in the intellectual and spiritual development of twentieth century American thought. Watt is best known as an interpreter and practitioner of Zen Buddhism during a time where this practice was not very [...]
Julian Barnes short new novel, The Only Story, is reminiscent of his previous Man Book Prize winning novel The Sense of Ending in that it is a novel in which an older man looks back on his life. In the case of this book the narrator, Paul, is [...]
Tommy Orange’s debut There There is one of the most lauded books of 2018 and for good reason. Orange, a creative writing teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts, opens this novel with an essay on Native American culture that is fresh, [...]
Portland based writer Willy Vlautin’s latest book, Don’t Skip Out on Me, moves away from the Pacific Northwest and plants us in Nevada. Horace Hopper is a young man who has spent his entire life on a Nevada Sheep Ranch. Adopted by a kind [...]
Mr. Wolf’s Class, the new graphic novel by Aron Nels Steinke, is a colorful and well-drawn book aimed at elementary aged students. As the book opens, Mr. Wolf enters a new classroom at Hazelwood Elementary school set to start his tenure as a [...]
Shortly after WWII, a cameraman for the Nazis, one who worked directly with the famed Leni Riefenstahl, moves his family to Bolivia. Hans Ertl, the patriarch, has not put his camera away, and instead is filming a documentary about a lost city in [...]
At the time of his death, in March of 1970, Erle Stanley Gardner was the bestselling American author of the 20th century. Most famous for his character Perry Mason, a sleuthing criminal defense lawyer that invented and defined a genre. Outside [...]
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s Smile, his 11th novel, opens with middle-aged Victor Forde moving back to his hometown. Victor occupies a small apartment and walks down early each night to a local pub for a pint. One evening he runs into an old [...]
How a path traveled by one becomes the path traveled by a few, and to later emerge as a recognized trail, is the heart of the matter in On Trails by Robert Moor. As a thru-hiker of the Appalachian Trail, Moor writes a strong and compelling [...]
The Road to Jonestown, the new book by bestselling author, Jeff Guinn, opens in November of 1978 in Port Kaituma, Guyana. On that fateful day, 900 people collectively took their lives in one of the most infamous, mass ritualistic suicides in [...]
Huffington Post Blogger, Astrophysicist, and all around curious guy, Mario Livio is the author of five previous books on physics, mathematics, as well as over 400 scientific articles. Why? What Makes Us Curious is his first foray into the world [...]
Harry Hole is back. I repeat, Harry Hole is back. For everyone out there worried that he wouldn’t return, worry no more. Jo Nesbo is the king of Nordic noir. If one person could be said to have put Scandinavian crime fiction on the map, it [...]
The World To Come is Jim Shepard’s latest collection of short stories that are all epic historical pieces that perform unimaginable feats of storytelling in the small space of a short story. The book is the latest from the author, whose [...]
Days Without End, Sebastian Barry’s Costa Award winning 9th novel, is a visceral and lyrical western that is traditional only in the sense that there are horses and Indians. Barry’s strength is how he uses non-traditional tropes to tell the [...]
Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than fifty-five plays and three short story collections. As an actor, he has been in over sixty films and was nominated in 1984 for an Academy Award for his role in The Right Stuff. The [...]
The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States was a surprise to the nation. From the outset, reality star and bankruptcy mogul, Trump seemed like a long shot until he wasn’t. In the days, weeks, and months following [...]
Javier Marias is the author of more than a dozen novels and his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy has been lauded by some as the greatest European work of the 21st century. Marias’ work is always a high literary endeavor, Marias himself an anglophile [...]
Teddy Rinaldi, an ambassador to a Persian Gulf king, gets a call from his wife Christina explaining that their 8-year-old son Toby has been kidnapped while flying from NY to San Francisco. With no sign of their son anywhere, and nowhere else to [...]
Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City is a beautiful and gut wrenching multi-generational novel centered on the time of the rise of the Ba’athist party regime in Aleppo. The destruction that the party inflicts on Syria is [...]
Paulo Coelho gives us a fictionalized account of Mata Hari, the accused spy and famous dutch exotic dancer, in his new aptly titled book The Spy. Hari has been the subject of film, biography, documentary, and mythic lore. Coelho takes a turn at [...]
