Books in Brief: "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros
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"The House on Mango Street" is a debut coming-of-age novel set in Chicago, written by Sandra Cisneros—a primary figure in Chicana literature.
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Books in Brief: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz
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This debut novel by Junot Díaz received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
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This instant bestseller by John Steinbeck has been called the author's masterpiece, and also his most problematic - albeit ambitious - novel.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: "Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward
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A different take on the American road trip, and winner of the 2017 National Book Award for fiction.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
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Each of the ten stories in this seminal collection by Flannery O'Connor are captivating and unnerving.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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An award-winning novel by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: "Love, Nina" by Nina Stibbe
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An award-winning epistolary memoir about a nanny who worked for London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers in literary London in the 1980s.
Read More"Five-Carat Soul" by James McBride: A Review
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This stunning collection of short stories illustrates how our common desire for freedom and equality outweighs what are often imagined or prejudice-rooted differences.
Read More"The Origin of Others" by Toni Morrison: A Review
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Toni Morrison was arguably the first black woman to be accepted into the “studiously” white American literary canon, and, after winning a litany of official accolades including the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for Literature, she could deservedly rest on her laurels.
But instead she’s trying her hand at a somewhat new exercise with her latest book, The Origin of Others.
Read More"The Idiot" by Elif Batuman: A Review
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Having given her first book the same title as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Elif Batuman has kept that streak going with her follow-up, but any comparison between the two would be apples and oranges.
In The Idiot, Batuman tells the story of a unique but hardly extraordinary Turkish-American Harvard freshman, and not the tumultuous life of someone like Dostoevsky’s 1868 protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin.
Read MoreBeyond the Arab Spring, the Fight for Freedom in the Digital Age
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Six years ago, on January 25, thousands of people descended on Tahir Square in Cairo for a protest that would eventually topple the government and escalate the Arab Spring. On the anniversary of that climacteric demonstration, and in the wake of historic, global women's marches, we take a look at two works that offer some of the past year’s best insights into dictatorship and protest.
Read MoreBooks In Brief: The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
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A story about contemporary misogyny and female friendship as ten women are abducted and held prisoner in a mysterious outback asylum.
Read MoreBooks in Brief: The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
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11 connected short stories following the comical, English-upper class adventures of Bertie Wooster and his trusted butler Jeeves. Like an old British sitcom in book form.
Read More"Zero K" by Don DeLillo: A Review
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Don DeLillo is an undisputed master of the English language and his latest novel, Zero K, is yet another example of his gift. Themes he has long explored -- fractured families, death, terrorism, war and technology -- in earlier books like Underworld, White Noise and Libra are all in abundance in this, his seventeenth novel.
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