Jamie S

Filtered almost exclusively through Amir's muddled consciousness, Moon Brow is intimate in its inquiries and epic in its scope, ushering the reader through some of the most turbulent decades in Iranian history, and from locations as diverse as the polluted heat-haze of modern Tehran to the burning battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War, to the near-mystical calm and beauty of the Caspian Sea. Mandanipour reminds us that true humanity belongs not in the grey corridors of officialdom or on the f

By the time of his death in 2017, Denis Johnson had long been acknowledged as a contemporary master of the short story, worthy of comparison to latter-day luminaries such as Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis. From his 1992 breakthrough collection, Jesus' Son, to his late-career novels, Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams, he'd succeeded in enchanting — and disturbing — a whole generation of book-lovers with his bleak, beautiful tales of life at the ragged edges of Ame