If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! I purchased Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life some years ago on the strength of her book Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which I remember being a tremendous read. I wonder now whether I’d feel the same way upon...

Whew, here I am, having emerged from air after slogging my way through Elizabeth Hoyt’s Lord of Darkness, the latest in her Maiden Lane series. Though not a long novel, Lord of Darkness certainly feels it: I suspect that there might be some sort of time dilation powers hidden within its pages. There’s a reason that category romance novels tend to...

There are many kinds of bad novels. There are those that are simply bad for me, those that are deliciously terrible, and those that are merely dull and purposeless, warranting a “why bother?” response. But perhaps the very worst of these is the novel that is disappointing, the novel that has that potential to be so brilliant, but simply is not. Anne...

  Although I read  January First late last year, it’s probably apt that it’s my first review for this new year. The book’s title is one of semantic multiplicity: it represents not only one family’s efforts to put their troubled daughter January (Jani)’s needs first, but also the sheer atypicality of January and her needs, as...

  The other night I attended a Christmas dinner for fourteen people, only a handful of whom actually knew each other. We all know how these events play out: awkward introductions where people try to define their lives as concisely as possible so as not to bore the others, and yet verbosely enough that they might find something, anything in common so that...

As we speak my mother-in-law is planning for the apocalypse. Or, at least, three days’ worth of the apocalypse, which she is expecting to coincide (perhaps fittingly enough) with her husband’s sixtieth birthday. Her laundry is a-glug with bottled water, her pantry stocked with starches galore, and she’s planning on hitting the supermarket the...