In a glade near Limerick, Ireland, a troupe of actors gather for their 20th anniversary production of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” unaware of a plot by real Feyland fairies to sabotage the performance and end the production for good. Del and [...]
In The Tree That Grew Through Iron, the first book in The Panagea Tales, McKenzie Austin has created a remarkably inventive and magical novel that transports readers to a future where the world as we know it is no more. After [...]
There are countless novels inspired by government conspiracy theories, and the most famous may be MK-Ultra, a CIA program that created highly trained sleeper agents. Tom Schneider, author of Broken Monarch, writes with the passion of a true believer as he [...]
"Call him Samuel Bennett." Dylan implores of his reader, echoing surely, "Call me Ishmael," from Melville's Moby Dick, another protagonist whose agency is faded in favour of adventure. This unfinished collection of stories by Dylan Thomas captures a strange young man's [...]
In Hardbarned!: One Man’s Quest for Meaningful Work in the American South, an amusing and insightful memoir by Christopher J. Driver, readers are invited to commiserate with a hardworking American in a tough world, trying to pursue the happiness of writing [...]
Any reader of popular fiction knows that underestimating the unlikely heroine is never a good idea, and this is poignantly restated in Epiphany's Gift, a timely thriller by Mallory M. O'Connor. Epiphany Mayall stands in the center of this story, while [...]
In McDowell, tragedy and consequence lead an arrogant and narcissistic Dr. Hiram McDowell to examine his life and search for life’s meaning beyond winning and possessions. Hiram is first glimpsed leaving his Mt. Everest climbing partner to die. If that’s not [...]
Raw… gritty…no single adjective can sufficiently describe the intensity of A Child is a Piece of Paper, Lance Crossley’s starkly realistic novel. The year is 1960. Six-year-old Wanisin Blackwill and his older sister, Mitena, are forced to leave their Indian reserve [...]
Portraits is quite an achievement, as dauntingly detailed in its character descriptions as Shaw (who also wanted his actors to have particular heights, clothes, and eye colors, and his sets to have specific furniture), and as discursive in its stage directions [...]
A grimy New York book is always a winner, and here Moshfegh takes the lethargy and defeatism of twentieth century East Coast living and rolls it up into her protagonist, a nameless, monied female narrator on the cusp of George W's [...]