Holy Cow
Library Journal Review Yes, that's actor/director/screenwriter Duchovny with an upbeat parable of animal-and maybe world-liberation. When a cow named Elsie Bovary inadvertently learns about something awful called an industrial meat farm, she instantly organizes an escape with a Torah-spouting pig named Shalom, newly converted to Judaism, and iPhone-proficient turkey Tom.
Outline
The New York Times Book Review – Heidi Julavits …lethally intelligent…While the narrator is rarely alone, reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this […]
Lila
The New York Times – Michiko Kakutani : Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story about two lost people who, after years of stoic solitariness, unexpectedly find love—not the sudden, transformative passion of romantic movies and novels but a hard-won […]
The Snow Queen
The New York Times – Michiko Kakutani Michael Cunningham's resonant new novel…is arguably [his] most original and emotionally piercing book to date. It's a novel that does not rely heavily on literary allusions and echoes for its power—a story that showcases the author's strengths as a writer and few of his liabilities, while creating a […]
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time : the Graphic Novel
Publishers Weekly L’Engle’s Newbery Medal–winning 1962 novel of good, evil, and quantum physics gets a stellar (no pun intended) graphic novel treatment from Eisner-winner Larson (Mercury). Larson’s loose, modern drawing style focuses on the characters, largely omitting backgrounds and leaving readers room to add their own imagination. Meg Murry looks every bit as gawky and […]
Chained
This book was received as part of a grant from the Children's Literacy Foundation (clif).
Radiance of Tomorrow
The New York Times Book Review – Sara Corbett Radiance of Tomorrow is…a rare look at the phenomena of homecoming and reclamation, written with the moral urgency of a parable and the searing precision of a firsthand account…Beah's voice is more expansive and lyrical here than in his memoir [A Long Way Gone]…there is an […]
Someone
Publishers Weekly In this deceptively simple tour de force, McDermott (Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award) lays bare the keenly observed life of Marie Commeford, an ordinary woman whose compromised eyesight makes her both figuratively and literally unable to see the world for what it is. When we meet her on the steps […]
The Unwinding : an Inner History of the New America
The New York Times – Dwight Garner This book hums—with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America's increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery…The Unwinding contains many sweeping, wide-angle views of American life. Its portraits of Youngstown, Ohio; Tampa; Silicon Valley; Washington; and Wall Street […]
Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore
The New York Times: …[a] slyly arch novel about technology and its discontents…The culture clash at work here—Google aces wielding the full, computer-assisted strength of their collective brainpower, one scholar fiddling with a quaint astrolabe—has a topicality that works to this novel's advantage. Mr. Sloan fills his book with wittily-drawn prodigies, then makes them wonder […]