Book Review
The House with All the Lights On
Elegiac in tone, Jessica Kirkness’s "The House with All the Lights On" is a touching family memoir in which language and technology enable connections with deaf grandparents. Kirkness grew up next door to her grandparents, immigrants...
Book Review
How We Know Our Time Travelers
In Anita Felicelli’s stunning short story collection "How We Know Our Time Travelers", technology and the supernatural are rival routes to understanding time, loss, and memory. These speculative stories are set in California in the...
Book Review
Cats & Us
Cats & Us is a charming collection of mini-essays highlighting human-pet interactions over time and across cultural contexts. Its several-page spreads consider how felines relate to certain subgroups of people, including children,...
Book Review
Keep
For the central trio in Jenny Haysom’s astute and appealing novel "Keep", held and released secrets and possessions threaten to disrupt the course of life. Harriet, a poet in her eighties, is slipping into dementia; ““if this last...
Book Review
What We Can't Burn
Eve Driver and Tom Osborn’s spirited, conversational book What We Can’t Burn concerns how activism and entrepreneurship might interact in the struggle to mitigate the climate crisis. Driver and Osborn met as Harvard classmates. They...
Book Review
Body Phobia
Dianna E. Anderson’s "Body Phobia" is a convincing personal and philosophical exposé of how a culture that fears bodily differences harms vulnerable people. Anderson, who is nonbinary, trans, and queer, grew up in an evangelical...
Book Review
No One Talks About This Stuff
"No One Talks About This Stuff" is a ranging anthology of frank, humorous essays about facing infertility, pregnancy loss, and childlessness. The twenty-two contributors felt “disenfranchised grief” over pregnancies that did not lead...
Book Review
A Dictionary of Modern Consternation
Resembling an updated Devil’s Dictionary with its sarcastic definitions of buzzwords and euphemistic phrases, "A Dictionary of Modern Consternation" sifts through business and technology jargon and slang vocabulary in a subversive...