BookBrowse Editorial Review
Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness
by Megan Eaves-Egenes
(5/20/2026)
Megan Eaves-Egenes, a travel writer known for her work on Lonely Planet, has dedicated herself to the preservation of the night sky. In Nightfaring, she journeys from location to location—a small English village with no streetlights, a hill in Uzbekistan where a medieval astronomer plied his trade, a health resort in Japan with a focus on the benefits of darkness—to take in the majesty of the night while also highlighting how thoroughly modern society has pushed it to t
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Nonesuch: A Novel
by Francis Spufford
(4/8/2026)
Iris Hawkins is a financial secretary in London with quite enough to worry about. The Nazis have just invaded Poland, and the bustling city is subsumed with blackouts, air raid sirens, and the sense that things are about to get much worse. But after a hookup with a young man named Geoff (who works in the nascent medium of television), she's pursued by a monstrous figure made of old newspaper. From there, Iris is drawn into the world of the occult, where she must stop a fascist plot to rewrite hi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Age of Calamities: Stories
by Senaa Ahmad
(1/14/2026)
Ahmad's approach in The Age of Calamities is similar to that of Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth, where all of history exists in a curious in-between state: the Antrobus family simultaneously lives in mid-century America and at the start of the Ice Age, with Mr. Antrobus inventing primitive devices like the lever from the comfort of his modern circa-1942 home. There are some stories where this approach works better than others. "Inside the House of the Historian" is goo
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
(11/5/2025)
In both plotlines, two very bleak worlds are gestured at—in the former, rock and roll doesn't exist; in the latter, sandstorms consume Los Angeles and large swaths of America have joined the separatist state of Disunion—but at no point does Erickson bog himself down with worldbuilding... What matters is the sense that we've collectively gotten off on the wrong exit.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin
(10/8/2025)
The important thing to understand about these three stories (and the three others that make up this book) is that none of them is called "Good and Evil." This is a sly tweak of a typical naming convention for a short story collection: instead of one story lending the book its name, the title (and all six stories) makes it clear that "good" and "evil" are just tidy ways we can rationalize our ugliest, least explicable emotions. Like fellow Argentinian Mariana Enriquez (another author translated b
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar
(9/10/2025)
The Magician of Tiger Castle is billed as Sachar's first book for adult readers, but in all honesty there isn't that much to scare off precocious young readers. In fact, the general contours of the plot—frustrated young royalty, star-crossed lovers, et cetera, et cetera—pretty much are a young adult novel. It's bald, beleaguered Anatole, with his immortal mouse and his array of urine cups (a necessity for any self-respecting magician in those days), who lends the novel its wry
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Fox: A Novel
by Joyce Carol Oates
(7/30/2025)
A cross between Humbert Humbert and Tom Ripley, Fox is a well-educated con artist who idealizes the young female form... What makes Fox's passages illuminating rather than gratuitously ugly is how clearly Oates sees him as the pathetic wretch he is. When we watch Fox connive his way into the tony confines of Langhorne Academy, we receive no vicarious, Ripley-esque pleasure from the process—only frustration and disgust at the naivete of people who should know better.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel
by Dennard Dayle
(7/2/2025)
If this sounds like it could be the premise of a didactic satire where the only laughs are dry and mirthless, don't worry: How to Dodge a Cannonball is seriously, genuinely funny. The dialogue hits the same sweet spot as a Coen brothers movie, funny and literary without getting too cute (a representative example: "At least I didn't run like a scared dog. I ran like a shrewd coyote"). And Dayle's narration is wry, ironic, and as keenly observant as the best stand-up.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
by Leah Sottile
(5/7/2025)
Blazing Eye Sees All is especially illuminating when illustrating how the American New Age movement is connected to the far right. New Age belief is often coded as left-wing and hippie-ish... But in fact, various New Age movements throughout the past century are not unlike what might be referred to as the "alt-right" today. Sottile draws a line from Love Has Won and QAnon back to the 19th century with Helena Blavatsky, whose belief system was rife with race science and inspired Nazi occul
BookBrowse Editorial Review
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
(4/9/2025)
One day, without warning, the moon turns into a giant ball of cheese. Every piece of moon rock on Earth turns with it. Nobody knows why, and there is the general understanding that nobody would be able to find a satisfying answer if they went looking for one. What would you do in that situation, faced with such a grand cosmic joke? When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a series of vignettes starring a Magnolia-sized ensemble, including (but by no means limited to) an ex-professor of philo
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
(1/29/2025)
But if Invisible Cities did nothing but frogmarch the reader from one obvious message to another, it wouldn't be a classic of postmodern literature. Even at his headiest, Calvino was a playful writer, endlessly imaginative and inventive. The novel's tone is mostly reflective, even somber, but beneath meditations on capitalism and semiotics, there is a treasure trove of the weird and wonderful. In just a page-and-a-half, Calvino makes any given city feel more intriguing and tangible than t
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee
(9/4/2024)
Isadora returns from art school to Slater, the mining town where she grew up, to attend the funeral of her abusive father, and it's immediately clear that she doesn't relish this homecoming: as soon as she steps out of the car, she refers to "Slater winter smothering me like a friend," a nice bit of description that says a lot about how she feels about Slater and even more about how she feels about friends. There is no shortage of narratives about trauma these days — especially horror narr
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
(7/17/2024)
Bury Your Gays is a horror novel that satirizes modern Hollywood: a world of soulless executives who reanimate dead actors with AI and defer their decisions to the almighty Algorithm. Tingle has no shortage of great, provocative ideas. But as imaginative as the author clearly is, his prose rarely does more than get the job done. There's the occasional burst of gnarly imagery (as when the aforementioned bigwig "pops like a water balloon" under the falling piano), but too often Tingle settl
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Cecilia by K-Ming Chang
(6/5/2024)
In broad strokes, Cecilia's story is a familiar one: girlhood friends pushed apart by an inability to deal with their burgeoning sexuality, reunited years later. But Chang's prose, as well as her willingness to dig her fingers into the fertile soil of her protagonists, truly sets it apart. There is nothing polished or sanitized about the desire this novella puts on display, none of the gauzy, soft-focus sensuality of lesser lesbian fiction. With something unmentionable caked under its fin
BookBrowse Editorial Review
I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
(4/17/2024)
Rainy's journey is filled with striking, memorable details and setpieces, captured with imagination and verve by Enger: a sinister character who owns a cross made of "two automatic rifles," a forsaken island whose populace paints murals of their dead, and a harrowing stealth mission to circumvent a tyrannical toll booth operator. I Cheerfully Refuse, as its title suggests, is a book intended as a missive against the status quo, which is to say a missive against hopelessness. More cynical
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Cahokia Jazz: A Novel
by Francis Spufford
(3/6/2024)
When it comes to alternate history, a compelling scenario only gets you so far. It's impressive to come up with a well-realized setting, one that might have existed had a few metaphorical butterflies not fluttered their wings, but simply describing how this strange new world came to be is not enough: a fascinating history textbook is still a history textbook. What's really impressive is using that setting as a jumping-off point for a cracking great story, the kind of story that turns a bit of be
