Featured Author News & Interviews:
A Talk with Jonis Agee (The Bones of Paradise)
Praised by the New York Times as “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” Jonis Agee is the award-winning author of 12 books. Her latest, The Bones of Paradise, is a multigenerational family saga set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee, and is at once a mystery, a tragedy, a romance, and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality that defined the settling of … [Read more...]
Featured Reviews: Adult Books
All the News I Need by Joan Frank
From the moment 62-year-old Oliver Gaffney — Ollie — shuffles onto the first page of Joan Frank’s slim but deeply perceptive sixth book of fiction, All the News I Need, it’s impossible not to find him endearing. Yes, he’s an obsesser. An incessant kvetcher. A glass-pretty-darn-well-empty sort of chap. Still. When we first meet him, he’s scouting out men in a San Francisco park while sitting on his favorite bench. Sort of. Ever since his semi-partner of two years, Ennis, died in a car crash … [Read More...]
Woman No. 17 by Eden Lepucki
A wealthy blonde from the Hollywood Hills (adjacent) with a toddler to watch and a tell-all memoir to write. A (too) doting second husband who has been banished to his famous-photographer sister’s for a trial separation, but will do anything to return. A live-in nanny who isn’t quite who she says she is. You get where this is going. On the surface, Edan Lepucki’s third novel, Woman No. 17, is full of these familiar tropes. But if you dismiss taking a gander because you’ve “read all that before,” you’d be making a mistake. … [Read More...]
Featured Reviews: Adult Books
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
For an author with five works of fiction under her belt, the prolific Elizabeth Strout is testing out an intriguing theory with her latest book: When a formula works, stick to it — and not just any old formula, but one that won you one of the most distinguished honors in literature. Much like the heavy-hitting Olive Kitteridge, which earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and spawned an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand as the intractable Olive, Anything Is Possible is a … [Read More...]
The Underworld by Kevin Canty
If you haven’t spent an evening or two in the grand company of Kevin Canty’s work, now’s your time to start. His previous four novels and smattering of short story collections are deeply rooted in time and a strong sense of place. His characters are flawed, often drunk and achingly human. On a line-by-line level, his staccato sentences are simply drawn yet suffused with bitterness, sorrow, loneliness and unrealized desire. In other words, Canty’s chosen genre is fiction, but he peddles truth. His latest novel, The … [Read More...]
