Central character Nick Gallagher is an aspiring boxer who tends bar at the Blue Paradise, located in the unfashionable district of Manhattan known as Hell’s Kitchen. Author Matt Bloom, a former boxer and bartender himself, not... Read More

Fighting bird proprietor Sonny Cantrell slouches forward through a miasma of rural fits and starts into the tentative landscape of young manhood as the central character in Manley’s debut novel The Cock Fighter. Covering just two days... Read More

Spectacular sunsets, secret lights from outer space, a mysterious and probably conspiratorial organization, and subterranean journeys appear like highway water mirages in G.W. Hawkes’ quirky short novel about two old hermits and their... Read More

Glorie is octogenarian Glorie Carcieri, the opinionated and determined protagonist in the debut novel of Caryn James, the chief television critic for The New York Times, and a frequent Times contributor of film and book critiques.... Read More

In this cinematically potent novel, we meet protagonist, Katherine Dennison, who suffers from a series of acute personality foibles due to the death of her son and subsequent divorce from her husband. She has spent the last three years... Read More

Dark and wry ironies pile up like bodies on a battlefield in Jospi Novakovich’s fourth book, a collection of excellent short stories about Croations caught in the absurd twistings of their war-ravaged homeland or trying with equal... Read More

“Every rainstorm, every one is different, but the feeling is the same. There’s glory in it. There’s victory,” proclaims Hank Beecham, profes-sional rainmaker. The protagonist’s obsessive quest for victory on his own dark,... Read More