Editorial reviews

About The Rules of Magic: A Novel

The Rules of Magic shows that sometimes the work you do comes back to you threefold — and sometimes you go back to the work you've done, and unfold three times more color from it.

About The Rules of Magic: A Novel

Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist—delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel.

About Savage Country: A Novel

These are broad strokes written in strong, precise sentences. It’s a strange book, that way. But why not write a strange book about fire and blood and our past, right now? Never again, each civilization tells itself, when we pause to look back.

About Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties — just announced as a finalist for the National Book Award — is an abrupt, original, and wild collection of stories, full of outlandish myths that somehow catch at familiar, unspoken truths about being women in the world that more straightforward or realist writing wouldn't.

About The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

Whether you're a foodie or a history buff, this should be a satisfying read; sometimes the best way to history's heart is through its stomach.

About An Unkindness of Ghosts

It is an antidote to poison. It is inoculation against pervasive, enduring disease. Like a vaccine, it is briefly painful, leaves a lingering soreness, but armors you from the inside out.

About We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Perhaps Coates’ response is found in the sharpest and most reverberating question of the entire volume: “How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you?”

About Logical Family

“A day without tolerance is a day without sunshine,” Maupin writes, and “Logical Family” succeeds in reconciling the distance between his heritage and the legacy he leaves to generations of readers. Engaging and revelatory, Maupin’s memoir is a delight, punctuating a distinguished career in letters.

About Things That Happened Before the Earthquake: A Novel

The Germans have a tidy word for these stories of artists coming of age: künstlerroman. From the very first page, Barzini probes smeared boundary lines, testing their power to lash back as Eugenia transgresses. The earthquake looms, and though we know that we always rebuild, there’s unavoidable wreckage: Surviving is always a chance, never certainty.

About The Ninth Hour

What McDermott achieves most splendidly is the hyper-realistic portrayal of the grim, often disgusting aspects of illness and death among the poor: the boils and pustules, the grotesquely swollen or missing limbs, the ubiquitous stink of human waste.

About Fresh Complaint

Searching for enlightenment, Mitchell interprets the constant ringing he hears as a herald of revelation, although it might as easily be a symptom of malnourishment.

About Fresh Complaint

Eugenides has written life-altering books of that sort, and “Fresh Complaint” isn’t one of them. But its charm and insight are real, and formidable.

About We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

It is to Coates’s credit, though, that by the time you’re done reading “We Were Eight Years in Power,” you also see what he does — namely, that far too many whites are overlooking what is so plainly staring them in the face, and that America couldn’t have a black president without boomeranging back to its ugliest self.

About American War: A Novel

War may inevitably dehumanise the people caught up in it, but a novel, however well intentioned, ought not to follow its example.

About What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories

Where Shapiro attempts to do what Pym does, working backward by examining any mention of food that appears in the historical records of the real-life characters she has chosen, she is less successful.

About Greater Gotham

Greater Gotham offers a wealth of such experiences. It is this combination of the scholarly and the pop that makes it such a compelling read. The average reader will find herself eager to pick up the book — and not just for bicep curls.

About Her Body and Other Parties

It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror.

About Old Scores

It also sets up intriguing possibilities for the future of Llewellyn himself, his employer, and Barker’s former ward, Bok Fu Ying, whose role in the proceedings is both complicated and memorable. I’m looking forward to reading more.

About A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949

The relationship, always a difficult one, once again begs reinvention. However, unlike the world of 1949, so dramatically described by Peraino in his timely book, our current globalized world renders separation not even thinkable.