The last book I read was essentially a modest holiday tray of baklava bites: tons of little snacks, all with flaky and delicious layers. Neatly packaged in a breezy 177-pages, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill gives readers just enough to chew on with short chapters and even shorter paragraphs. It’s one of those “read in oneContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Kimberly Tolson”
Category Archives: The Last Book I Read
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Monique Ferrell
Review by Monique Ferrell I’m partial to stories that bookend themselves. The text begins with a Black man standing literally and metaphorically on the edge. Frustrated with life—with the treatment of Blackness in the world in which he resides—he leaps from the roof of Mercy Hospital, clad in blue silk wings. Broken-hearted, he takes withContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Monique Ferrell”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Peter Remien
I love academic satire. Classics of the genre such as Richard Russo’s Straight Man (1997), Jane Smiley’s Moo (1995), and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) have long been among my favorite novels. Two of the best recent additions to the genre are Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members (2014), an epistolary novel told almost entirely throughContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Peter Remien”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Landry Cash
Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts Tara Karr Roberts’s 2024 novel Wild and Distant Seas offers a fresh perspective on feminine resilience and the power of memory. This narrative is about four women who are all connected to the character Ishmael from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. Wild and Distant Seas begins withContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Landry Cash”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Marlowe Daly-Galeano
When I read Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), I wondered if that was the pinnacle. There was no way Bechdel’s latest comic novel, Spent, could be as good as Bechdel’s prior book, a memoir that hilariously explores being a middle-aged woman in a body. As a middle-aged woman in a body myself,Continue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Marlowe Daly-Galeano”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Elizabeth Bradfield
Most recently, two friends have handed me books that have haunted, inspired, and lingered for me. The first is The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island by Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon. Monkman is a painter; I first saw his work a few yearsContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Elizabeth Bradfield”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From CMarie Fuhrman
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow It had been two months of cozy holiday romance and “romantasy” when our local Indie bookseller put this in my hands. I wasn’t certain. I had been reading cozy fiction for a reason: for escape, for delight. The cover looked a bit intimidating—not as playful, and the stakes wereContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From CMarie Fuhrman”
The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Kim Barnes
Of Time and Punishment, the recently released memoir by LCSC alum Jerry D. Mathes, is an exciting continuation of the work he has been doing since I first met him over two decades ago. I’ve always been a fan of Jerry’s writing–he is the author of six previous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, asContinue reading “The Last Book I Read: A Recommendation From Kim Barnes”