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Reviews

Reviews

by Christopher Beha - Fiction

On the day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity --- he correctly forecast every outcome of the 2008 election --- Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. His first assignment for the Interviewer is a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, known to Sam for the sentimental works of baseball lore that first sparked his love of the game. When Sam meets Frank at Citi Field for the Mets’ home opener, he finds himself unexpectedly ushered into Doyle’s crumbling family empire. While their lives seem inextricable, none of them know how close they are to losing everything, including each other.

by Richard Ford - Fiction, Short Stories

In SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after 20 years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

by Lawrence Wright - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

At an internment camp in Indonesia, 47 people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When microbiologist and epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city. A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare. Already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic.

by Anne Tyler - Fiction

Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell's heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan's office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan's elegance, success and spiritual force. Surrounded by Nell's ex, her best friend, her best friend's boyfriend and Joan's buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.

by Louis Begley - Fiction

After four decades of what he believes to be a happy, healthy partnership, Hugo Gardner's world is overturned when he learns that his wife, Valerie, is not only requesting a divorce but has left him for a younger, more vital man. Hugo, an octogenarian political writer and retired journalist for Time, must rethink the way he's lived, and reassess how he'd like to spend his remaining years. With an ominous oncologist's report hanging over his head, Hugo decides to get away for a bit, to a conference in Paris. A new romance blooms there, and Hugo finds himself wondering if growing old in Paris might be the perfect antidote to the drama he left behind in New York.

by Jenny Offill - Fiction

Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to "Hell and High Water," the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink --- she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction --- but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows.

by Edward J. Larson - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Theirs was a three-decade-long bond that, more than any other pairing, would forge the United States. Benjamin Franklin, an abolitionist freethinker from the urban north, and George Washington, a slaveholding general from the agrarian south, were the indispensable authors of American independence and the two key partners in the attempt to craft a more perfect union at the Constitutional Convention. Yet their teamwork has been little remarked upon in the centuries since. Illuminating Franklin and Washington’s relationship with striking new detail and energy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson shows that theirs was truly an intimate working friendship that amplified the talents of each for collective advancement of the American project.

by Will Self - Memoir, Nonfiction

Unflinching, intoxicating, heartfelt and propelled by an exceptional energy, WILL is the long-awaited memoir by Will Self, whose works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over 20 languages. It spins the reader from Self’s childhood in a quiet North London suburb to his mind-expanding education at Oxford, to a Burroughsian trip to Morocco, an outback vision in Australia, and, finally, a surreal turn in rehab. Echoing the great Modernist writers of the early 20th century in its psychedelic stream of consciousness, WILL is vividly imagistic and mordantly witty. It is both kunstlerroman and confessional, a tale of excess and degradation, a karmic cycle that leads back to the author’s own lack of...will.

by Anna Wiener - Memoir, Nonfiction

In her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener --- stuck, broke and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial --- left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory and, of course, progress. Anna arrived during a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.