Though Everton, New Hampshire, the town in Annie Hartnett's Unlikely Animals, is fictional, it becomes real through historical research, current events and masterfully drawn characters. This ...
Read ReviewNaturalist Ernest Harold Baynes
In Unlikely Animals, Clive Starling pals around with a hallucination of Ernest Harold Baynes, a real-life figure sometimes called the American Dr. Dolittle. Through his deep reverence for animals, ...
Read ArticleDavid R. Gillham's latest novel, Shadows of Berlin, opens in New York City in 1955. Rachel, a young Jewish woman from Berlin, has managed to avoid the horrors of Hitler's concentration camps but ...
Read Review"Degenerate Art" in Nazi Germany
In David R. Gillham's Shadows of Berlin, the protagonist's mother was a modern artist whose work was banned by the Hitler Regime. Adolf Hitler didn't originally intend to have a career in politics,...
Read ArticleHernan Diaz's Trust is a work of fiction that is itself comprised of four very different works existing in the world of its story. Bonds is a novel published in the 1930s about Benjamin Rask, who ...
Read ReviewHow TV & Film Portrays Capital Accumulation
Hernan Diaz has said about writing his novel Trust that, despite the numerous books depicting 'the symptoms of wealth,' 'there are very, very few novels that deal with the process of accumulation of ...
Read ArticleWe have all dealt with inescapable, insufferable family members at some point, and the ones who say they haven't are probably lying. I have read beautiful, fully dimensional novels about familial ...
Read ReviewYour Early 20s, Joan Didion's "On Self-Respect," and Social Media Culture
For a moment, I can pretend I am a professor, like Joan Didion-obsessed NYU English professor Nick Harrison in Grant Ginder's Let's Not Do That Again, as he discusses her 1961 essay 'On Self-Respect' ...
Read ArticleIf you had the opportunity to prevent one of the world's most horrific disasters, would you? What if saving thousands of lives meant losing your daughter? Such is the premise of Rachel Barenbaum's ...
Read ReviewThe Soviet Atomic Bomb Project
In Atomic Anna, the protagonist Anna Berkova is the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist. Collaborating with famed German chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, ...
Read ArticleThe Colony opens with Mr Lloyd, a London artist, being transported to a Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) island in a hand-rowed currach, eschewing the more convenient passenger ferry. This attempt at ...
Read ReviewColonization and the Irish Language
In Audrey Magee's The Colony, one of the characters dedicates his career to salvaging a language that is under threat of extinction: Irish. The source of his research is a multi-generational ...
Read ArticleMetropolis
by B. A. Shapiro
"An ingeniously plotted hybrid social/suspense novel. Shapiro hits it out of the park."
—Shelf Awareness
Oh William!
by Elizabeth Strout
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep.
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It was one of the worst speeches I ever heard ... when a simple apology was all that was required.
See who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.