“What do you do with a sick chemist? Helium. Or curium. Or barium.” What do chemistry and literature have in common? Both help us make sense of the world. In her debut novel, Weike Wang turns chemistry into alchemy with a blend of concise writing, Chinese wisdom, and unexpected humor. Wang leaves her protagonist, a […]
New Reviews
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
Fine is what we say when someone asks how we are. Fine says just enough and nothing at all. Debut novelist Gail Honeyman introduces a character who is quirky, possibly delusional, and absolutely, positively, not fine. Honeyman’s light touch makes readers laugh while exploring the natures of empathy and love and the meaning of being […]
Eggshells, by Caitriona Lally
Vivian is wonderfully, extraordinarily, odd. She keeps her great aunt’s ashes in a box rather than an urn because “death in a box is more real than death in a jar.” She doesn’t like verbs because they expect too much, and prefers examples to instances. Vivian (she prefers viv, a palindrome) wants a friend named […]
Rabbit Cake, by Annie Hartnett
Elvis Babbit’s mother makes rabbit cakes. No, that’s not an euphemism for a vegetarian carrot cake, and no, they do not in any way resemble the smiling, cloud-frosted concoctions for sale at an Easter bake sale. They bake in a three dimensional mold and, when frosted properly, resemble a living rabbit (Elvis’s mother even fills […]
Bookish Dispatches
Summer Reads 2017
I recently had the great pleasure of talking books and summer reading recommendations with Sheila Burns, the co-owner of Bloomsbury Books, and Geoffrey Riley on the Jefferson Exchange. https://cpa.ds.npr.org/ksor/audio/2017/07/jefferson_exchange_2017_july_05_hr2_b.mp3 I could easily spend all day talking about books, it really is one of my favorite parts of my job. What kinds of […]
Poems to Celebrate National Poetry Month
I wrote a lot of angst-filled poetry as a teenager, badly rhymed and full of mixed metaphors and cliches. My career as a poet was short lived; I read poetry, but cannot claim its creation as my own. For a long time I thought poetry had to sound and look and feel a certain way. […]
Q&A with Annie Hartnett
Two of your characters suffer from sleepwalking. Are you, or is anyone close to you, a sleepwalker? I sleepwalked only once, in college after I’d been up working on a paper for several nights in a row. I went to bed, but I was worried about a friend of mine who’d gone out that night— […]