An essay on Blade Runner's lasting power, drawing on Stephen Vaughan's set photographs of Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah. It ties the film's city detail, loneliness and shifting cuts to Philip K. Dick's novel and to nostalgia for a future now in the past.
A roundup of October's best-reviewed nonfiction ranks Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man first, followed by Lieke Marsman, Meghan O'Gieblyn's memoir Will and Attention, Tracy Daugherty's Cormac McCarthy biography, and Lindsey Fitzharris's Sherlock Holmes study, quoting critics on each.
A Halloween reading list of ten eerie poems by poets such as Cynthia Huntington, Joy Harjo, Eve L. Ewing, Charles Simic and Louise Glück. Each entry is briefly analyzed for its hauntings, real-life horrors or unsettling mood.
Erin Hoover's third poetry collection, Consent, due from Black Lawrence Press on May 11, 2027, uses documentary collage and nonlinear narrative poems to portray coercive control and recovery from intimate partner violence. The reveal also covers the cover painting by Audrey Ryan and design by Zoe Norvell.
In an interview about his new novel The Disappearers, Marlon James discusses its queer characters in 1980s Kingston, revenge, masculinity and violence, and how his characters take over his plans. He says he wrote it for the queer gaze, not for straight readers.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Stephen Patrick Bell
Walker Rutter-Bowman reviews Hagfish's reissue of Cynthia Buchanan's 1972 debut novel Maiden, following Fortune Dundy, a thirty-year-old virgin in a Los Angeles singles complex. He examines its satire of dating, jobs, television and self-presentation, praising Buchanan's prose.
— via The Paris Review, Walker Rutter-Bowman
A review of Chad Harbach's The Brightness, a 672-page follow-up to The Art of Fielding set at Westish College in 2015. The reviewer praises its character-driven drama and its serious treatment of campus sexual assault, while faulting the stilted bro dialogue.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Greg Zimmerman
A review of Sam Riviere's novel Doppelgänger, set at a fictional English author academy where students begin mirroring one another. The reviewer finds the book's treatment of doubling, loneliness and creativity fascinating, while faulting its repeated, underexplored remarks about American students' bodies.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Gianni Washington
Book Marks rounds up the week's best-reviewed titles, led in fiction by Walter Mosley's Hanging & Burning and in nonfiction by Lindsey Fitzharris's Sleuth-Hound and Lawrence Wright's Redemption, with critic excerpts from outlets like Booklist, Kirkus and The New York Times Book Review.
— via Literary Hub, Book Marks
A review of the film adaptation of Daniel Kraus's novel Whalefall, in which Jay Gardiner dives to recover his father's remains and is swallowed by a whale. The critic praises Austin Abrams' performance and the practical effects but finds the flashbacks heavy-handed and the CGI damaging to the emotional climax.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Ashley Hatzenbihler
Jihoon Park says his debut novel Stickman began as a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction about the psychology of school shooters, and only came together once he rebuilt it as a dual character study. In research for the book, he found that even shootings labeled political or ideological often carry grand motives that mask underlying emotional and mental struggles.
— via Chicago Review of Books, benjamin inks
Glenway Wescott's 1928 story collection Goodbye, Wisconsin is back in print through Belt Publishing's Revivals series. Its stories of return, written by a gay Wisconsin farm boy turned Paris expat, push against the idea that the state is full of shy conformists.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Ross Collin
Lee Holleman’s first impression of the campus left her flat. It looked undernourished, somehow: a sense of architectural scrawniness. “The University of Tennessee was overrun with students from…
— via Literary Hub, Tracy Daugherty
The times aren't uncertain, the argument goes; our language just makes them feel that way. In On Un/Certainty, Natasha Lennard draws on Wittgenstein to pick apart bedrock claims like "the border is insecure" and the idea that climate change needs artificial superintelligence to solve.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Tucker Legerski
In Texas, a challenged library book must be kept from students until the school board acts, which can mean 90 days or more off the shelf even if it's kept. Fairfax County keeps it available throughout the review, and Hanover splits the difference.
— via Book Riot, Nikki DeMarco
After a nearly relentless run of blockbuster novels, this week's new releases skew toward nonfiction, including Lawrence Wright's Redemption, Blake J. Harris's biography of Larry David and Thomas Frank's takedown of the innovation myth. Poetry from Meghan O'Rourke and Lindsay Turner also lands on the list.
— via Literary Hub, Julia Hass
Janasha Prabhu spent about eight years writing Monster in the Mirror, a thriller about a serial killer's niece who is stalked by her uncle's copycat. She says she deliberately gave the killer little depth, because media coverage of true crime too often makes killers infamous and leaves victims forgotten.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Devi Bhaduri
Emily Feng spent months negotiating the first on-the-record media interviews with Uyghurs in northern Syria, a community of roughly 20,000 that Beijing cites to justify its mass detentions in China. She took off her jade bangle and held back her Mandarin to avoid triggering trauma, then found many of them were eager to speak it.
— via Literary Hub, Emily Feng
Desirée de Fez's novel opens with two sisters and their mother hovering over their children, then turns to body horror when a band of blood appears across all three women's stomachs on Christmas Eve. Tentacles come out of Alba's abdomen, and the hallucinations that follow force her to ask who she is when she isn't blurred into her family.
— via Chicago Review of Books, Leah Rachel von Essen
Sociologists Tiffany Gayle Chenault and Georgiann Davis say academic training leaves scholars unready to write for a general audience. Chenault needed two developmental editors to get there, and Davis argues colleagues should stop avoiding their own positionality out of fear of seeming biased.
— via Literary Hub, Tiffany Gayle Chenault and Georgiann Davis
