GENERATION REGENERATION, one-stop shop for practical usable solutions to ugly problems

GENERATION REGENERATION
TONY CHO
Greenleaf Book Group Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In an era where concrete dominates and nature feels distant, regenerative placemaking is a movement transforming our cities and rekindling our connection to what truly matters. Generation Regeneration shows us how to rebuild balance between people, communities, and the planet.

Drawing from decades of lived experience, impact entrepreneur and visionary real estate developer Tony Cho introduces you to regenerative placemaking—a transformative approach that moves beyond sustainability toward systems that actively heal, uplift, and regenerate. Through this lens, cities become living ecosystems where community, nature, and culture work in harmony to create abundance for all.

This book equips policymakers, developers, cultural builders, and everyday citizens with the tools to reimagine urban life. You'll explore the three pillars of regenerative placemaking and learn how they can cultivate economic vitality, deepen human connection, and foster environments that nourish both people and the planet. Through real stories from pioneers on the front lines, you will discover that a regenerative future isn’t just possible—it’s already emerging.

Generation Regeneration is an invitation to become a co-creator of thriving, life-affirming cities for generations to come. Join the movement to help shape a world where humanity and nature flourish together.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A developer writes a book about how development, the process of turning our planet's surface into living spaces and zones of economic productivity, into less ecologically and emotionally harmful, wasteful, unpleasant places to be.

I would never have believed you had you told me this would occur in my lifetime. Here it is.

Greens will snort derisively about human greed and outrageous destructiveness. Boosters will blow cigarette smoke at you as they dismiss everything in it as pie-in-the-sky too expensive and who cares anyway. And neither entrenched camp will have read a word.

Bunkered and siloed in our Rightness we can let compromise solutions like these slide through our fingers to fall into the landfill/sewerage outflow pipe. We need solutions, imperfect ones are all we're ever going to have, so think with me about whose mind we can still reach to get these ideas, these goals in front of. Parks department people. High school students and their science teachers. Recent graduates. At ten bucks a pop, you can likely afford a well-thought-out gift to one of these folks; you have their email addy and an ebook can be sent to them blind or to a young person with a phone app.

You and I, doing our whatever we can, will not ever know whose mind we changed that one little bit to get them to do one small thing. Maybe not even something related to this book's topic; but something. And activists who think of development and developers as hopeless causes (as I used to do) can get lots of really valuable ideas for how to approach them with real, viable thoughts on development instead of destruction.

A book that is easy to read and also cracks the nonsense barrier with commonsensical ideas is a great investment. I encourage all y'all to make it.

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto
KAZIMIERZ MOCZARSKI (tr. Sean Gasper Bye)
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the death of over 50,000 people: Jürgen Stroop.

For 255 days Stroop talks to Moczarski of his life, entirely unrepentant of the crimes for which he would soon be executed himself. Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski's first-hand account of these extraordinary exchanges, an insight into the mind of one of history's most brutal war criminals, and one that unflinchingly examines some of humanity's darkest moments.

Never before published in the United Kingdom, Conversations with an Executioner is a book of enormous historical importance, written in masterful prose by a writer who tragically wouldn't survive to see his work published.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.

If you're wondering who the January 6th/ICE criminals are when they're alone with their thoughts, this is the book to tell you the nauseating truth. A person of no curiosity, no accomplishments of mind, no apparent capacity for self-reflection or empathy. A creature of appetites without moral guardrails that he shared with his cellmate as he waited out his time before execution. A simple mind that craved the validation of his own importance received from patently manufactured myths of Honor and Valor in committing vile acts of cruelty, allowing him to believe his basest urges were noble...ennobling his acts. It really startles me that this guff works in the twenty-first century.

The author was only alive because the Stalinist government post-WWII wanted to physically (in the usual ways) and psychologically (by having him share a cell with Stroop) coerce him into admitting he told lies about their Stalinism's resemblance to Nazism. To resist them in his mind, he thoroughly interviewed Stroop, working the details into his memory, using the horrifying scum's self-confessed deeds to shore up his own rightness and righteousness.

It's here I have to confess that I wobble a little. Moczarski was in the cell with Stroop until his 1949 execution. Moczarski was not freed from the threat of execution and the actuality of torture until 1956, the post-Stalin awakening. He did not write stuff down in that cell. It's true that psychological abuse creates hypervigilance...I suffer from it...and a truly demonically exhaustive memory, but seven years of gap allows things to get muddled, some to get lost, most to fade.

Fact-checking what's fact-checkable doesn't turn up glaring obvious fabrications. But so very much of the stories' content is, at best, only checkable in broad strokes. I don't think Moczarski set out to exaggerate or to create more awful deeds than Moczarski spoke of. I think he told the truth about what he was told. It's still hard for me to say I think his account is inerrant; and the accusations Stroop leveled against himself in his own words are appalling enough to require me to leave room for Stroop to speak with misguided self-aggrandizement.

It makes the modern Gaza genocide more starkly evil.

THE MINIMALIST, music is a hard, demanding master to serve

THE MINIMALIST
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer’s descent into madness.

As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss’s rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music has long been assured. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything—including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.

Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder’s late son, Oliver—like Mia, an Asian American adoptee—Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder’s home to finish his last work. There, Mia is forced to confront her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers; her lingering guilt over Oliver’s suicide; and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.

Drawn from the author’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, The Minimalist is a harrowing examination of loss, torment, mental illness, self-harm, and artistic self-destruction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Music is not a career, a job, or even a calling so much as an identity. "A musician" is not always employed making music, but they are still a musician. Those whose income derives from whatever facet of performance or creation are not *more* musicianly but simply luckier.

Or maybe not.

My second Kailee Pedersen read gave me deeply unsettling dreams about the (to me) horrifying psychological agony of being A Musician who is simply unfit for other work. Its Procrustean demands, its necessary or sometimes just conveniently available pressures to conform to a standard of self-presentation can cause deep psychological wounds. As the astonishingly complex intersectionality of Mia's identities are laid bare in her reckoning with Oliver, Ryder, adoption, musicianship, we're drawn into her psychic damage. It's horror, it's horrifying, it's horripilating as it unfolds in Author Pedersen's words. I had never once given any thought to the true extent extant in the phrase "putting oneself into one's work," but I will not be using that phrase lightly in future.

Is music a thing, an entity outside us? Is a musician possessed by music? Or does the rigorous mathematical nature of composing and performing music simply attract creative people with obsessive personalities? I don't know; I didn't even know to ask the question before I read this story. It is the best kind of reading experience for me, that. When an author's chosen story gives my endlessly curious brain something new to chew over, to turn at unusual angles so I can see its lumps and rough patches, I am deeply satiated and grateful.

So where's that fifth star? That all adds up to a rave review, doesn't it? It does; tempered with a slight squeamishness. It's often the case in body horror stories that I, on the rare occasions I buy into the horror elements, think "that right there is a bridge too far." I got there during this read. A whole half-star's worth of there. *shudder* I don't think many gore-readers will batten on the careful, attentive buildup of the story, either; it's really, despite the shuddersome bit, a psychological unraveling story where the unraveled bits also form mummy-wrapping strips of Mia's psychology.

It was a fascinating reading experience. I am reinforced in my high opinion of Author Pedersen's storytelling eye. I am also never going to be able to listen to music blithely, unthinkingly appreciating the sounds in the air...I'll be ever afterward aware of how much music costs the creators.

And how much of themselves they put into it.

VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five, fascinating story of a fascinating book's creation

VONNEGUT’S WAR: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five
SUSAN FARRELL
Bloomsbury Academic (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, preorder now for delivery on 20 August 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Banned, burned, and censored, Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely regarded as one of the greatest (and most controversial) novels of the twentieth century. Fusing vivid biography with popular history and close textual analysis, Vonnegut's War tells the fascinating story of the making of a modern classic and the writer that created it.

New archival discoveries and recently released oral histories give us the fullest account yet published of Vonnegut's real-life prisoner-of-war experiences at Stalag IV-B and Dresden, which heavily influenced Slaughterhouse-Five. A recently discovered trove of letters introduces us to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, and her influence on his writing. Along the way, we also encounter UFOs and aliens, grapple with the shadow cast by the Vietnam war, and unearth the stranger-than-fiction tale of David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden, the historical reference behind Vonnegut's writing about the Dresden firebombing.

This book sheds light on one of America's most beloved writers and explores how cultural forces helped to shape a modern masterpiece of storytelling.

Susan Farrell is a professor of American Literature at the College of Charleston. She has published two previous books on Vonnegut and founded the International Kurt Vonnegut Society.

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My Review: Billy Pilgrim shaped many an internal landscape after his appearance in 1969. My older sister encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was fourteen or so; I did, and was genuinely not the same person after the read. I've always been sure war and other kinds of industrial-scale killing were wrong, and tools of oppression and manipulation used by "Them" (the ever-shifting, always-there overclass) to ensure no individual of any class ever truly feels secure for very long. It read to my young self like the bravest kind of art, made to tell ugly truth in carefully crafted images. It was sublime. (I stand by my 2014 review.)

As a middle-aged man I read the story again, on the fortieth anniversary (more or less) of the first read. Same story, different reader, similar conclusion reached...though with nuances like a shocked certainty that Billy Pilgrim was Vonnegut's PTSD personified, that the entire exercise was a therapy session shaped into a narrative of brutal honesty and deep personal exposure underpinning artifice, maybe art, maybe just the complete relatability of honest, truthful self-examination made public.

Twenty more years have passed. I'm not drawn to the text for another read, too few eyeblinks left to me and too much good stuff as yet unread. This book, telling the story of how Slaughterhouse-Five came to be over the course of more than twenty years in the eventful, interesting life of Kurt Vonnegut. It was a long-term, multi-partner effort to shape Vonnegut's trauma into the glittering form we possess now. Access to much material previously off-limits to researchers makes the role of Vonnegut's much-maligned first wife in shaping the narrative more evident. We all, in the twenty-first century, have a very, very different understanding of gender dynamics than was available to any but the most advanced academic thinkers during the years Vonnegut was composing Slaughterhouse-Five. His evident misogyny went well beyond the cultural norms of his era. It's not emphasized in the book nor is it glossed over; this is at heart an academic book, though, so it sticks to its lane more than a purely popular one would. As a factor in the creation of the work in question the reprehensible misogyny and abuse Vonnegut doled out are in the DNA of the story. It's discomfiting to read the clear-eyed portrait of Vonnegut in the throes of creation. Confronting the damage he (knowingly, deliberately) enacts on those around him is unpleasant, as I've grown my mind around the work he's done over the majority of my approaching seventy years on Earth. The older I get the more I realize how little has really changed since the men who wrote the "idol with legs of iron, and feet of clay" quote appearing in the Bible sharpened their styluses.

As Author Farrell's pursuit of the reality behind the making of Slaughterhouse-Five she does the hard work of giving perspective to the acts of its creation in the context of the times. Who was this WWII veteran trying to find perspective on his experiences reading, talking to, using as sounding boards? Could this specific novel have come to be in 1949, 1959, even 1965? I remember the ferment of those years, the way my older-than-most parents were constantly blindsided and upset by the world changing so much so fast...Vonnegut was younger than they were so I realized with a start in reading this book. It adds a piece to my vision of Slaughterhouse-Five that I'd never had. It takes reading a book written about a book getting written to bring perspective to my settled opinion of a story published almost sixty years ago. Do you need a better illustration of why reading, writing about reading, and close and careful analysis of stories are more important than ever in a world getting "AI" shoved down its throat?

What this read did for me it can do for you and for others. No "AI" (properly "LLM") can do what Author Farrell did here. Human brains make connections among data points derived from deep research. They're what creates the synthesis of information that synthetic entities steal to regurgitate to the uncritical as new and insightful ideas. It's true, they are new and insightful; but if you've read the stolen source material, you realize how the scam works. It's new to you, not freshly newly thought up. This is why controlling the world's IP is such an incredibly important part of the scam.

My proof is here, in this well-written, thoroughly researched story of the making of a story that defined the emotional state of a man, and thereafter of a generation.

R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE 2: Harith Athreya series 3 & 4...PRAYING MANTIS, and THE LAST RESORT

THE LAST RESORT (Harith Athreya #4)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 18 August 2026

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There's blood in the backwaters of Kerala…

BOLLYWOOD

Detective Harith Athreya is recuperating in the beautiful backwaters of Kerala when he meets a family of vacationing Bollywood royalty, who ask for his help making a murder mystery film.

BANKRUPTCY

But the family is not what it seems—there are rumours of major money troubles, links to organised crime, and rivalry between the scions.

BUTCHERY

When one of them is found dead, murdered exactly like a victim in the film, Athreya puts his holiday on hold to solve the case. Is this the work of an angry co-star, or something more sinister?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Latest of the four (to date) Golden-Age inspired mysteries set across the wildly varied, beautiful subcontinent of India. Using plots we've all loved for generations, techniques of obfuscation and misdirection that work as intended here like they have since Mary Roberts Rinehart began practicing her craft over a hundred twenty-five years ago, Author Raman brings new delights and fresh energy to the film-becomes-crime plot. We meet Mrs. Athreya at last! Dekight beams out of every passage she appears in, as her lifelong love of Bollywood and its films is meshing with the Gurua family's vacationing next to the resort she;s brought her husband to as he recuperates from dengue fever.

It's permaybehaps not my own favorite, that would be Grave Intentions, as this entry lacks some expansiveness of characterization that it could've used. No one involved in the aforementioed Guria family is realized all that well, in fact as the mystery unfolds it begins to feel as though Author Raman simply hasn't got much interest in them, leaving them mostly feeling like labels. The murder being a near-pefect echo of a famous scene in a Guria-produced movie really doesn't feel organic but put there to pique Mrs. Athreya's ongoing interest in the proceedings...a kind of authorial bribe to the character from the auythor that sadly doesn't keep her onscreen nearly long enough.

I'm so deeply pleased we gave the Dramatis Personae, two maps, and a pretty detailed Guria family tree; it is very helpful indeed. I'm always happier with these inclusions in any murder mystery. It's not always clear from dialogue and narration how everything fits together without maps.

A series I'm very happy I've discovered, and expect will continue.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


PRAYING MANTIS (Harith Athreya #3)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: ISOLATION

Harith Athreya is taking a well-earned break at a boutique hotel in the Himalayan foothills. But his holiday is swiftly cut short when mysterious bloody handprints start appearing on the walls around the resort.

INCRIMINATION

When a woman then falls to her death, chaos and confusion reigns. The hotelier is convinced that the key to the case rests with four other young people who checked in at the same time as the victim, all pretending for some reason not to know each other.

INTRIGUE

Did one of these guests have something to do with it? Harith Athreya must get to the bottom of the case before the murderer strikes again…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The PreCrime Unit strikes again, this time in a very exclusive resort in the sweetest spot possible: a castle in a Himalayan valley. The owner is a friend of Athreya's who's harboring dark suspicions about a small group of guests staying in his resort. Unease is not proof of guilt but Javed is willing to bet these five are bad news and innkeepers, like bartenders, are usually correct in their darker suspicions.

It doesn't take loong for there to be a murder, and even less time for Athreya to see past spurious alibis, though the motivation for the specific crime committed is not really believable to me. I got a bit over the fashion focus of this entry in the series as well...you're in the Himalayas! Tell me more about them not about fabric colors!

Personal crotchet, that; others will feel differently. It's so good to have the Dramatis Personae, the maps, and our brief character descriptions to refer to. I'm not going to tell you I loved the story, a take on one of Dame Agatha's most famous stories which even naming will give everything away. It's a good enough hommage to its famous progenitor. It isn't my favorite thing to have a woman in the story who's pretty thoroughly demonized for what felt to me to be ridiculous, overblown reasons. I'm not convinced by them as you can tell.

I can't quite go all four stars given my reservations but I'll most definitely be picking up book four.

HENRY TUDOR MUST DIE, feminist historical revenge fantasy about a notable femicidal maniac

HENRY TUDOR MUST DIE
JILLIAN LAINE
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: One queen exiled. Another headed for the gallows. Both hungry for revenge. England’s most infamous queens set out to reclaim their story and unite in vengeance against Henry VIII.

Anne Boleyn is going to die, and neither her cleverness nor her witchery can save her. So when her late rival, Catalina de Aragón, miraculously appears in her cell at the Tower of London on the eve of her execution, very much alive and offering a daring escape plan, no one is more surprised than Anne.

Lina doesn’t have Anne’s magic—but she has just as much hate for England’s wretched king. Severed from her daughter and stripped of all her influence, Lina breathes only for the Hellebore Sisterhood, a clandestine and powerful society with a vested interest in keeping both queens alive…and using their particular skills to advance womankind.

Anne and Lina’s old rivalries pale in comparison to a common enemy. One by one, they capture their pawns, infiltrating the court, recruiting the new queens in Henry’s orbit, and eliminating the men who plotted against them. Always inching closer to their true target…

And they want his head.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What if the serial-killing society-wrecking lying scumbag H8 had been telling the truth (for once) when he accused Anne Boleyn of being a witch? What if the recently-deceased rightful queen,here called by her proper name Catalina de Aragón, shows up in Anne's cell before her murder as a representative of the Hellebore Sisterhood, a supernatural group determined not to put up with H8's shenanigans against women?

As a fantasia, the musical composition sense applied to fiction, on the awful facts of Tudor England, it struck many a satisfying note. (My biggest quibble is with lesbian Anna of Cleves. It feels silly, but good lord I'm not quibbling about a months-dead Catholic lady from religious-nut Spanish parentage appearing in her adulterous replacement's cell to rescue her from her judicial murder so never bloody mind about that I guess.) H8's reign is one I'm always interested to read disruptions and alterations of because he was such a pill. Because his greed, his arrogance, his utter self-regarding solipsism was so hugely consequential in all the worst ways on England's social fabric that it always makes me smile in schadenfreudic glee when a writer unleashes hell on him.

Unleashing hell is a plan for the Queens in this revenge fantasy. I don't think another ragefest of this type would necessarily fly, or at least it wouldn't with me, absent such a horrific target for the Queens' H8rade punch. It gets pretty, uhhhmmm, vivid so it won't leave you in any doubt about why the subject of their (out)rage is chosen, and thus leading you to who the Hellebore Sisterhood might be. It's a topic I'd love to discuss but one huge spoiler tag might cover it but will also drive potential readers away. I'm here for more Hellebore Sisterhood stories if you choose to write them, Author Jillian.

And that coming from a man, who is not a massive fantasy-readin' lover of the tropes, ought to say a lot. I think as alternate-history stories about these Queens they're no great shakes, failing the believability test at literally every turn; they're not meant to be alternate-history stories but fantasies set in an alternate universe where there are other rules for physics. None of this is going to convince wedded-to-consensus-reality reader to drop their filters, so my purpose is to warn those folks to shop elsewhere. None of this story will work for you.

Author Jillian's debut adult novel is a delight if you'll let go of the slavish adherence to plausibility rules about history retellings. It's easier to write straightforward fantasy where one invents a secondary world with all-new names and no stroppy literalists who Have Opinions about bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated Reality. I myownself greatly prefer Author Jillian's way of engaging with one of History's most fascinating inflection points.

What explains my missing half-star is a certain lesbian. That really did feel like I'd been asked to go a bridge too far. I'm an old grouch, I get to have crotchets just because. I want to draw your attention to the remaining four and a half shiny stars to have my reputation as a discerning judge of quality entertainment validated.

THE TAKEN GIRLS, Glenn Cooper thriller in his classic mode

THE TAKEN GIRLS
GLENN COOPER
Lascaux Media (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Glenn Cooper, the internationally bestselling author of the Cal Donovan thrillers, comes a gripping thriller of kidnapping, conspiracy, and what powerful men will do to hold on to what they have.

Two little girls vanish from a villa on the Calabrian coast—Victoria, five, and Elizabeth, eight, sisters, the granddaughters of an American billionaire. It looks at first like a kidnapping for ransom.

But no demand ever comes. No ransom means no one wanted money—they wanted the girls.

Years pass. Their grandmother's hair goes white. And then, on an ordinary afternoon, the girls come home. Victoria is still five. Elizabeth is still eight. The same faces, the same small hands—not a day older than the night they disappeared, and dying of something no child should carry.

Everyone wants a story that lets them sleep. The Vatican opens a quiet file on a miracle. The tabloids sell something stranger. But one man keeps pulling the thread everyone wants left alone—until it leads to an old Spanish estate, and to what the powerful will do to hold on to what they have.

Victoria and Elizabeth were not the first children taken. And they are still collecting.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's never aliens. Or god. Never.

Just like the only monsters are people. For something to be SUPERnatural, we'd need to know everything that could ever happen naturally. A glance at the news will tell you we do not know everything that could happen naturally. So reading his very complex puzzle-box of a story was an exercise in seeing if the author could get me to the end without making me feel I'd been treated like a mushroom. (Kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit.)

I've read several of the author's religious-themed stories before, and found them like this one: Pleasantly diverting. I do wish he'd stop writing female characters, or take a sensitivity course...they're ciphers or stereotypes.

The patriarch who hires our omnicompetent investigator grated on my nerves. Marcus, said investigator, doesn't put a foot wrong that does not, in the end, result in the solution being moved forward. It's a bit annoying, but in line with most books in this chase-thriller genre. By the midpoint of the story there was a clutter of problems that were either going to get solved or niggle at me as unfinished business; nothing got left behind but it made the ending a breathless rush. That's fine for me but y'all who prefer endings that peel back layers will not enjoy it because it will feel rushed. I myownself would say it's calculatedly fast-paced, but that'a a poTAYto poTAHto argument I've found is not worth anyone's time getting into.

It was a read that engaged me but gave me no one to root for because the people were believably shitty. It's a good distraction that will never play games with your trust, people you don't like don't suddenly turn out to be sweetness and light playing a role (a trope I abhor) or suddenly doing other about-faces. The story resolves in line with its parameters only not quite so simply as one is led to expect. Nice work on that, Glenn Cooper!

R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE: Harith Athreya series 1 & 2...GRAVE INTENTIONS, and A WILL TO KILL

A WILL TO KILL (Harith Athreya #1)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: MIST, MOUNTAINS, MURDER.

Ageing millionaire Bhaskar Fernandez has invited his relatives to the remote, and possibly haunted, Greybrooke Manor, high up in the misty Nilgiris.

He knows his guests expect to gain from his death, so he writes two conflicting wills. Which one of them comes into force will depend on how he dies.

Fernandez also invites Harith Athreya, a seasoned investigator, to watch what unfolds.

When a landslide leaves the estate temporarily isolated, and a body is discovered, Athreya finds that death is not the only thing that the mist conceals. . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First in a new series of private-investigator mysteries set in India. This Golden-Age style story about a murder yet to occur and fully expected by its purported victim that then morphs into a locked-room mystery is investigated by a Poirot-level famous private investigator. Or so we're told...I'm as always just a bit annoyed that I'm vouchsafed no evidence of this assertion, but that complaint is not one bit new or unusual.

I was set to love the read from the get-go because I read these reissues this summer. It's set in cool, misty mountains, and I about sobbed with jealousy as I compared that to the supersummer outside. *sigh* As I encountered more and more characters, beginning to wonder about a dramatis personae being notably absent. Such a simple thing to add, I mused, and so very helpful. It also struck me that the characters were more or less in the highwayman school: stand and deliver their piece of the narrative. That's a lot of time spent outside the narrative stagecoach waiting to get moving again.

A body is discovered. It means we're all in the stagecoach again, moving at a slightly bouncy, uncushioned pace. It becomes a locked-room mystery as we're moving along; no change of bouncing rocking pace as we clunk shins and bonk shoulders with characters who *are* going to say their piece, despite earlier attitudinal tics. It could have something to do with the sausage-fest we're having here, everyone is male and don't they just show it. A second body is discovered and there is more stand-and-deliver set-piece delivery. A big problem for me is no one who's died is at all, in any way, undeserving of their murder.

It's like a lesser Poirot story meant to convey the eerieness of The Pale Horseman. It works as a story well enough because we know where we're going. It's a bit less effective if the reader's not already on board with the Golden-Age conventions because then the solution, and its delivery by Athreya, ties everything to objects we're aware exist but not filled in on particulars about. It makes the solution a bit less impactful, more like the delivery of a sermon that we and everyone else, simply accept is true and so must be correct.

Points for period appropriateness, then, fewer for fair-play mystery solution, and please dear goddesses give me a damn list of who's who at the beginning. As a series starter I'm most definitely glad I've got all four in their reissue; I don't think I'd've picked up the second one (see below) if it had come out a year or more later.

The ebook is on sale, so definitely go get one!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


GRAVE INTENTIONS (Harith Athreya #2)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Death, a cursed archaeological dig, and a beloved detective feature in this cozy stand-alone mystery set in contemporary India.

SECRETS

Seasoned detective Harith Athreya is back, this time to investigate suspicious incidences on a riverside dig in the heart of remote Bundelkhand.

SUPERSTITION

In this place, rich in myth and history, the legend goes that anyone who sets foot on nearby island Naaz Tapu would be cursed forever.

SLAUGHTER

When an archaeologist defies local folklore, the fallout is swift and deadly. Is the death a result of the ancient curse, or is it a more down-to-earth case of murder? Athreya needs to unravel the truth from legend before the curse strikes again….

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My Review: Archaeology! Possible supernatural stuff! A Dramatis Personae! Yes, yes, yes to all of these as good omens, and ways to get my repeat business.

On to the story.

Book two sets itself the task of telling us binaries exist for a reason, there is nothing we do not want to be expressed in a well-matched faceoff between, eg, two young women who are chilly career driven professional/warm, inclusive, family-loving opposites. Athreya is on a holiday with the latter, a nibling of his, and the former is the director of a "cursed" archaeological dig where a local wise guy seems to be stealing artifacts the dig is uncovering. A local legend of lovers kept apart by centuries old political feuding placing the area under a curse offers a modern murderer cover is the first thought a mystery fan would have; but who wants the specific person dead and why? What is the dig site looking for? Do local customs only matter if the people flouting them are white/colonizer people?

Again requested to solve a crime yet to take place, Athreya immediately zooms in on the artifact thefts but...well...are they thefts or rescues of cultural patrimony? Who decides this? What difference does it make, if the end result is the object ends up far far away leaving nothing in its place? Knowledge of the past that will never be accessible to the cultural descendants is no more complete a theft than a profitably sold antiquity....

In the quest to solve the mysteries via fair play, Author Raman snuck a valuable clue past me...in plain sight! Well done, sir. I enjoyed the Murder in Mesopotamia meets The White Tiger vibes. It felt more cohesive and less speechifyin' in tone than A Will to Kill (above) did. The read passed with admirable velocity, the Dramatis Personae made a big difference to my sense of the read as under my control, and Athreya's enough more familiar to me this time around that I felt prepared from the off to invest in his resolution.

A career spent making corporate presentations and mentoring young entrepreneurs has taught Author Raman to stay nimble, to choose a principle at the center of the story he wants to tell then to be sure his story relates to that principle all the way through. That serves him well in this second Athreya mystery/thriller.

HOCUS POCUS, a very resonant title for an exciting read

HOCUS POCUS
BRINDA CHARRY
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young magician travels across the world seeking fame and fortune all the while hiding a secret, in a novel based on the renowned, real-life Indian stage magicians performing in the United States in the 1800s.

Samuel Thomas, a man of uncertain parentage, is a young magician convinced that he is destined for greatness in a far-off land. Seeking honor and acclaim, he journeys across the globe—from India to London to the fog-shrouded streets of Boston in 1816, the infamous Year Without a Summer. In this season of unrelenting cold, Samuel arrives in a city alive with ambition, contradiction, and tension.

Enter Nathaniel in some ways a world away from Samuel, hailing from the upper echelons of Boston society, but also nursing a problem of his own. Proprietor of the New Boston Museum which is on the brink of bankruptcy, Nathaniel is desperate to find ways to keep it open—and Samuel is the ideal fit for the first live addition to the collection.

While the perfect solution to each other’s problems, the relationship between the two men quickly becomes complicated as Nathaniel grows more and more fascinated, and even obsessed, with the young foreigner. As Samuel becomes subsumed within the museum and dependent on Nathaniel, he must reckon with just how much he’s willing to give up to achieve success. Richly detailed and vividly conjured, Hocus Pocus is a story about art, ambition, and desire, and captures the crackling energy and wonder of a bygone era through the eyes of a young performer.

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My Review: The modern idea of a museum has its roots in the cabinets of curiosities, or wonder-rooms, of earlier times. It's my opinion their real roots are the human male need to possess...things...and explain them. (No one is allowed to use the sexist slur "mansplain" in my presence. I will perform the most intense demonstration of why you hate this tendency on you unrelentingly.) The young United States becomes their last stronghold, not least because of a man named Barnum. It's the fork in the road for the cabinet of curiosities developing into the vulgar, déclassé sideshow and the institution of High Culture the museum.

That split was already in progress as we meet Walter, a middle-aged proprietor of the New Boston Museum, still on the fence between the two courses of development. Walter is ably assisted by Ezra, who has the idea to perk up attendance thus profits by adding live performance of stage magic to the curiosities on display. Walter bites, as he does not really enjoy sending his unloved wife to see her rich father to get more money to fund his compulsive shopping problem, I mean collecting mania, that is to say procurement of further oddities and wonders for his museum.

Enter Samuel Thomas (né Kumar Samee), half-caste magician from Madras via London, currently performing in a Boston dockside tavern. Samuel has left the indifferent London he ran to as an escape from his grief and misery at losing his lover and stage partner Kabir in a horrible accident. The young United States is welcoming to Samuel because magic shows, stage illusions, and musical performances are very much in vogue. Samuel's dark-by-US-standards skin and his skillful illusions make him the answer to Walter's prayers.

It is a true meeting of needs, so the ways Walter seeks to alter Samuel...from being light-skinned in India and raised as a British boy to being required to darken his skin to suit US audience's race prejudices is quite a blow to Samuel. Obeying his meal ticket is the only viable option so he does it...but it costs him every time he shows his darkened face. This is where the authorial choice to give us the tale in alternating PoVs really pays its dividends. Samuel loves performing his illusions for the burgeoning audiences while feeling slighted and belittled by questions like "where'd you learn to speak such good English" and "but what are you, really" from the local yokels. Audiences have a way of turning into crowds when they get too close....

Walter is a different order of being entirely. He's nouveau riche, like all Americans of necessity must be; he's married into what passes for old money, and Puritanism, in the form of Sarah Talbot. It is expected that a man of his station will have a wife. Walter needs social credibility, and money. Sarah's Puritan father provides, very very grudgingly, because Sarah begs him to, the money to pay off Walter's moneylenders before they do dastardly deeds, possible irreparable harm, to his daughter's chosen husband. It leads to tense confrontations about worshiping idols and near occasions of sin in the family circle.

It's utterly charming how eagerly Walter displays his magpie autodidact's glory in Knowing Stuff. It's clear that this {insert slur from above here} is working on Sarah and Ezra. This causes the love triangles that never fail to enliven a story to multiply Walter's possessive joy in Samuel as performer and man. Sarah's father does not fail to clock the intensity of the feelings in his daughter's marriage and, being deeply Puritan, loudly disapprove of them all. This is all taking place in one of the world's most important climate crises, The Year Without A Summer; it was the first time science was applied to the problem of *why* the weather was doing something unusual enough to cause famines across the globe; and the increasing interconnectedness of the world meant there was actual evidence that the event was fully proven to be global for the first time.

The pleasure of this read is in the deft layering of these events real and invented into multiple meanings. Each character has a slant on all these facts. They interact and interlock to make very different life experiences; we-the-reader's experience contains them all, in varying amounts, to make a deeply satisfying story-reading experience. Boston, brash and burgeoning in this wildly new country, is a fully realized character of its own. An old city by American standards and one founded by religious nuts as a haven from conformity of conscience, it's only at this point that the conformity of conscience the religious nuts quite predictably enforced once they were in power is challenging Boston's elites. New ideas gain relevance and replace dogmas in moments of crisis such as 1816 represent. A wild, intense energy sweeps away old worlds, like Napoleon's recently concluded fall from power and the United States' shocking second victory in fifty years over its old colonizer in a war only barely over.

Abolition of chattel slavery is a more and more important brick in Boston's identity; it's increasingly part of England's social revolution so is much on the minds of all the characters. Samuel's not mistaken for a slave but his status as Other leads him into awareness of how slavery warps people. And his mind being agile and problem-solving, it's not a huge leap to his life as a colonized second-class person.

Text and subtext weave and fray and reweave in unusual, clashing-colored patterns in lumpy awkwardly hand-woven cloth in a society where smooth, carefully blandly uniform machine-loomed stuff is beginning a multicentury normalization. Reading this story was fun, fascinating, invigorating pleasure from start to finish.

THE SLOW ELEPHANTS OF MILAN, Argentinian strangeness in fragments you make into a mosaic

THE SLOW ELEPHANTS OF MILAN
ÁNGEL BONOMINI (tr. Jordan Landsman)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 11 August 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Enigmatic fictions from a lost master of Argentine literature.

A thick fog rolls into Milan as a man watches in astonishment while a procession of elephants crosses the street. A couple wandering through a forest is pointed toward a mysterious city from which they may never return. Two prisoners share a cell in the aftermath of a battle—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy.

The Slow Elephants of Milan expands Ángel Bonomini’s exploration of the interstitial realms between dream and reality. Originally published in 1978, these surreal and enigmatic fictions are among Bonomini’s finest and most autobiographical, threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine.

With delicate precision, The Slow Elephants of Milan deconstructs the scaffolding of our perceptions to reveal what lies beneath: a metaphysical mirror-world that shimmers with haunting familiarity.

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My Review: I didn't find the individual stories...twelve in all...particularly compelling as stories. Author Bonomini is no Hemingway, no transcendent master of the short-story form. He was an excellent craftsman who took great care to use the short-story form as a means to convey moods, insights, gestalts of incident building life.

The title story is a good example of this. A man sees a truly arresting sight: two elephants being led through the streets of Milan. Author Bonomini reflects on this without sentimentality, without concern for the elephant-ness of their existence; the narrator sees them when he is mid-reflection on the deep, deepening sadness of his life and soul; he sees these elephants multiple times walking almost unremarked through Milan's busy streets and is surprised afresh at how this sight he's captivated by is of little to no apparent interest to others.

Okay. That's the kind of trip we're going on, then, the odd but not impossible thing that carries Meaning and delves into Ideas. I wasn't eager for more but it's under 160pp, so what the hell. "Diary of My Portraits" was so memorable it lifted my impression of the collection above "nice work, not amazing but pleasantly engaging." In this story, the narrator sees a bird come into his apartment, thinks it is the same bird; but each time the bird is a different color. This happens in parallel to the narrator's partner painting his portrait, carefully and attentively creating an image of his face with laborious precision; then, dissatisfied with the likeness she has made, she destroys the portrait and begins afresh the process of capturing the narrator's appearance, his face, the image he shows to the world. Only to destroy it again. It is a lovely, poignant moment realizing that the artist's name...Moira...is a very interestingly resonant from its Greek bits to its resemblance to the Spanish verb form "mira"— "Look!"

To be the subject of this process, to have your likeness never completed, never satisfactory...to her, to the image's creator, no participation from you as the subject...was my key to finding these stories more in sum than they are as pieces. Gestalt formed yet? Everything in this collection of stories examines the image of a thing, the viewable parts changing but never fitting a single view, not even for a single viewer.

Instability and surveillance...seeing from on high...meet uneasily, irreconcilable in their differences of kind and sort of result. Nothing seen from the outside *is* the thing, no matter how much you want to call an elephant walking down a busy Italian street it is not.

It is itself.

Interesting ideas coming from perfectly fine stories will not be to everyone's taste, but I found the read much more than the sum of its parts.

THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties, do a vibe check...should it be 1998 outside? here's you a book

THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties
ED PARK
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 11 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.

The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.

Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

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My Review: I've always felt oddly indifferent to memoirs, assuming they're pretty much always a load of fantasies piled up in a kind of rough shape sort of evoking a person's past. Trust them? Trust them to what? No one's memory is perfect, often it's at complete cross purposes with others who were (probably, allegedly) there, and in any case is the purpose of a memoir to be a record, settle scores—or to tell people how the writer sees the past that made them, from the ground they stand on in the present?

Ed Park takes bits and fragments of observations, memories, dreams, flat-out stuff he wishes was true, shakes 'em out of a shoebox, makes a beautiful mosaic of prose that thinks it's poetry, and says "here, read this," with a bashful smile.

I believe that woman on the subway wished people a terrible day, but not that she had black teeth. Or she had black teeth and wouldn't speak, only how then would he know she had the black teeth? Why did his parents emigrate from Korea to the US? What the hell brought them to, of all places...Buffalo?!

All the stops on the tour of his life led to his present. That's enough to tell me-the-reader that these fragments, too small to be more than thoughts that don't have deep enough edges to interconnect, exist for themselves. We already know Ed Park's work. His life is in it already, his world-view is in it already, his memoir has no heavy lifting to do that an autobiography, or later a biography, couldn't, won't, do better.

Except tell you how he felt. That's what kicked my indifference aside as I sat in the middle of the piles of thoughts and ideas wondering how I should piece them together. I shouldn't. I should respect that he didn't do it for me, so maybe the point was not to follow a narrative on its arc. That surprised me because this was Ed Park's life.

Comes the dawn....

What's more important to know about someone you care about, care for...what happened, or how they're feeling...feeling about what happened/didn't happen/could happen/might have happened? Why do so many of us have therapists if not to have someone to tell the truth about how we're feeling and maybe why we think we're feeling that way?

It's probably as coherent in this book as it is in Ed Park's mind. I don't think the framing device, discovering the floppy disk (!!) in a box during the pandemic, is really anything to get humg up on but many Goodreaders seem to have beef with it. Beats me why. Gotta start somewhere and the mass-death event only a couple years ago seems like a pretty significant road sign.

At all events I'm glad I got to know Ed Park a little, curated bit. I think I'll read his next published fiction with some added fellow-feeling.

QUEEN MAB, debut surreal mother-fiction

QUEEN MAB
EMILY McBRIDE
FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this debut novel, a new mother—a scholar steeped in fairy lore—wrestles with the legacies and madness of motherhood.

There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?

Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.

Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?

Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.

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My Review: I speak from experience when I say psychosis is terrifying to experience. I do not wish it on the very lowest, worst human beings on the planet.

Not even MAGAts. Besides, most of 'em are already there.

Queen Mab is probably the best fictional evocation I've ever read as to *why* psychosis is utterly terrifying. Something Madeleine lnows cannot be true...is true. Everything she is, has learned, made her own mental world with, tells her this hideous impossibility: her child is a faery changeling. It is simply the truth.

What ensues is the other horrifying reality of psychosis: to get back to consensus reality means admitting you've left it, and that is a terrible, terrible moment in a person's life. It does not help that her career is the study of Victorian literature. Irish folklore. Made-up stuff that's now horrifyingly real in her brain, and she has to tell the people in her life that this is where she is. And she has to grapple with, not only having given birth, something her mother could not do and did not do so has no insights to offer but now Madeleine has to re-grapple with her status as an adoptee. Is this congenital? Is there something permanent wrong?

I'm well-known for not being in the Cult of Mother. Madeleine is probably burning her membership card. But a story like this one that carefully flenses the bullshit rainbows-and-lollipops stuff off the bones of the life-altering disaster-movie destruction of pregnancy, delivery, neonatal care, social rearrangement, marital instability...and all without making the process feel artificially predetermined....

It's quite a feat. It's a first novel so it can go over the top at times. It can seemingly forget where it's been to go where the author wants it to go. But it never fails to ground itself in Madeleine's world as she sees it at thee moment. It makes for a deep, unnerving reading experience. Madeleine's fear is we-the-reader's fear.

I'm very impressed. I'm intrigued by what Author McBride will create next.

STEFAN ZWEIG'S PAGE: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories, & ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Anthea Bell)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Stefan's Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman and other stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophüls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time.

A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn't know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even the story of a life lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love.

In the other stories in this collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister; two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart; and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude. All four tales, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among Zweig's most celebrated and compelling work-expertly paced, laced with empathy and an unwaveringly acute sense of psychological detail.

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My Review: It's the fate pf a popular, I mean with readers more than critics, writer to fall out of favor. Without critics in one's corner, the voice of the people who voted with their time and their treasure to engage with one's stories gets ignored.

This was the public's loved one Zweig's fate. Modern critics don't like him either, one saying he "...tastes fake...the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Ouch.

It's true to my experience of his writing that there's no deathless quality the I can discern, the sort of intense transporting intensity I experience in Thomas Mann or Kafka. At his most eloquent Zweig brings me an appreciative lightness of spirit; at his most Germanic he's pissy, irritable, and unbearably portentous. On balance he's the precise kind of writer who becomes popular because his (very real) talent does not have threatening depths. It seems a shame to me the world that loved him best, the US and Brazil, has left his memory in a drawer. Not a great, but still a good, storyteller, it feels to me like Pushkin Press Classics is doing good work to keep bringing him to our notice.

In my usual, fussy (so I'm told) fashion, the four stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is unsettling, uneasy-making; a woman writes to a famous author in terms of the greatest, most appreciative intimacy...but he has absolutely not one clue who she is. It is clear from the terms she's using for him that there was a legitimate connection between them. It is chilling how deep this connection truly is, given his unawareness of her as a person. (It could have something to do with her age at their first meeting....)

It's certainly true in my own life this kind of connection has formed, so I might be a bit more in tune with the awfulness of it. It ends a damn sight more tragically than anything like I've ever been a party to, and uses what would then be a current event...the 1918 flu pandemic...as both a resolution and an intensification of how terrible his guilt truthfully is.

A 1948 film was made of Letter from an Unknown Woman starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan that did not slap a happy li'l bow on its end. It's been preserved for posterity by the National Film Registry, probably in part for that courageous act of honesty in preserving the source material's more nihilistic intent (despite much jiggery-pokery to satisfy the Hays Code). It would be a terrific adaptation to make, faithfully this time, in the 21st century. all five stars

A Story Told in Twilight explores the first-kiss mishegas of a very ordinary boy. It happens in circumstances that, if you squint, might possibly lead to the, um, inattention and subsequent mistaken identity that plague this most commonplace rite of passage.

The translation's deft, the language felt like the entire enterprise was fun for the translator, but a more outdated premise would be tough to conjure in 2026. Not memorable, not terrible, not much of anything really. 3 stars

The Debt Paid Late looks at the running theme of missed/mistaken connections in these stories at a more mature angle. Like the old saying about "even small men cast big shadows at sunset" comes the accidental meeting of a woman with an old man who once meant everything to her. Because the story is about older people who reconnect from a genuine, if squicky by today's lights, connection it involved me more. Not a lot more, but more. 3.5 stars

Forgotten Dreams happened to me. It was as unpleasant as Zweig writes it. If you put yourself back into the path of your past self you will not come out unscathed. No man should ever expect the women from his past to spare his feelings, I'll tell you that for free. 3.5 stars

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new selection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day

Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars.

Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.

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My Review: "Gorky" means bitter? I'd always known Peshkov chose a pseudonym, who wouldn't with a collection of ugly spitty sounds like "Peshkov" staring you down, but "bitter?" Wow. A lot of details I'd forgotten I noticed clicked into place in my long-ago readings of Gorky...The Lower Depths, The Artamonov Business...suddenly make all the sense in the world.

Zweig knew the great and the good of the Interwar Period wherein he spent the bulk of his life. He would've been a lot of fun at a dinner party because, while it does not seem that he had a bitchy bone in his body, he had a very retentive memory and a strong desire to keep the friends he made so he heard a lot about them.

I am hard-pressed to imagine anyone who does not know who John Drinkwater was without the aid of Wikipedia will be inclined to pick up a book of musings on people like Toscanini, Arthur Schnitzler, and Emile Verhaeren. (For someone who doesn't like poetry, I sure know who a lot of poets are.)

If for no other reason than to bask in the glow of warm, appreciative writing by a friend who treasured friendship writing about his friends, this is a Zweig book to immerse yourself into. It brought me up short to realize how much the culture of that time formed my sense of aesthetics. I still revere Remarque and Joyce. I think many serious readers do. But it goes deeper, forming a bedrock sense of what is "worthy" in the art world, and that interested me to realize.

So here's Zweig, eighty-four years dead and mostly forgotten, still teaching a now-old man about himself. Published again and again after being forgotten for decades.

I hope there's an afterlife just so he can know it was, in fact, all worth it.

DANCE ON THE VOLCANO, a Haïtian Revolution epic of deep relatability

DANCE ON THE VOLCANO
MARIE VIEUX-CHAUVET (tr. Kaiama L Glover)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Dance on the Volcano tells the story of two sisters growing up during the Haitian Revolution in a culture that swings heavily between decadence and poverty, sensuality and depravity. One sister, because of her singing ability, is able to enter into the white colonial society otherwise generally off limits to people of color.

Closely examining a society sagging under the white supremacy of the French colonist rulers, Dance on the Volcano is one of only novels to closely depict the seeds and fruition of the Haitian Revolution, tracking an elaborate hierarchy of skin color and class through the experiences of two young women. It is a story about hatred and fear, love and loss, and the complex tensions between colonizer and colonized, masterfully translated by Kaiama L. Glover.

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My Review: A magisterial telling of the loud echoes of Revolution in the world of the 1790s. Saint-Domingue, as Haïti was called in colonial times, was a society primed to explode. With racial and political tensions reaching peaks guaranteed to end violently, we meet mixed-race Minette. Her singing talent is a wonder. It leads to the bending of many immutable rules. This was only possible during the ferment of the post-1789 world, but Minette really doesn't care...yet...as long as she can sing.

Evoking the colonial reality of Saint-Domingue in careful vignettes elaborated on enough to universalize the suffering they show, Author Vieux-Chauvet goes a bit overboard on description. What makes that work for me-the-reader in this story is the immersion it afforded me in a world I knew not at all. It was a revelation to me that the colonial forces wanted more huane treatment of Blacks, free or enslaved, than the on-the-ground colonist masters. It makes geopolitical sense, when one really looks at it; the government that promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 would not have thought to exclude Blacks until the colonial profiteers got hold of the reins again. It is this story that Author Vieux-Chauvet spends close-on 500pp telling through Minette's doomed love story.

As is ever the case, a woman must suffer for falling in love...always with the wrong man, usually with an abusive one, frequently enough a man who belittles her. Jean-Baptiste Lapointe, a free slave-holding Black man, rejects Minette with a lie about being disabled when she asks him to dance with her. I don't know about you but if someone did such a thing to me I'd avoid 'em forever after. Which is, I suppose, why no one will ever write a novel about me....

Minette is not a real person. She is a composite of free mulatto women Author Vieux-Chauvet encountered in her extensive research into the subject of Haïti's past as Saint-Domingue. Minette felt pretty real to me...though my goddesses does she cry a lot. If Kleenex had been in business then, Minette would've filled several landfills with tear-soaked wads of it. She's got plenty of excellent reasons, though. Her own precarious, rule-breaking career as a singer who entertains the white-dominated elite is stressful, her privileged access bringing her into their awful attitudes towards their slaves (who share half Minette's ancestry) means she sees firsthand the horrors of the enslaved's lives. It does not help that Lapointe, though Black, treats his slaves as vilely as the white colonizers do. The Parisians who now politically control Haïti/Saint-Domingue want to curb the brutality in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, those most Revolutionary of concepts (though that formulation, the French national motto, is an artifact of the late nineteenth century), leading to internal conflict in Minette's world. She develops as a human being and a political actor in her world over the course of the story. It is good to see this development in her, and in the world; but as we all know it's going to come to a tragic end.

Even in novels there comes Reality's ugly face.

A book written in 1957 and first translated into English in 2017, and since then largely ignored, and here's me guiltily writing up my reading notes for it almost exactly ten years after my own read of the DRC. I was not fired up by the story of a country given hope, then betrayed, in 2017. It's happening to me now. Faithful to the human adage "what's in it for me?" here I am recommending to all y'all you take off the blinders and read about the injustices the untrammelled ruling class always, always perpetrates. Learn how "They" perpetuate systems of exploitation and destruction solely for "Their" benefit. Don't look away. It's too costly to do.

SOLSTICE, yet another straight-people-unhappy tale with lovely bits about dance

SOLSTICE
CAROL GILLIGAN
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant but restless dancer discovers the true meaning of love and intimacy through the ebbs and flows of her marriage in this exquisitely written novel—from the bestselling author and psychologist whose feminist classic, In a Different Voice, revolutionized our understanding of women’s lives

Boston, 1969. Eve, a dancer whose feelings are expressed through the body and movement, senses an inexplicable distance growing between herself and her husband, Gabe, a journalist and father of her two children. Feeling lost and alone, she begins an affair; Gabe detects it immediately and begins one himself. Yet somehow they find their way back to each other, and when Eve gives birth to a daughter, their marriage becomes vital again.

Years later, when Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East and Berlin, Eve again perceives something is wrong in her marriage. Gabe no longer seems like the man she once knew. He has always had a darkness she could not fathom—deep psychological scars from his childhood, when Gabe escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport.

Amsterdam, 1991. Newly separated from Gabe, Eve has accepted a fellowship to choreograph a dance inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. When a colleague introduces her to a new translation of the ancient text, Eve begins to redefine the way she thinks about women, men, and relationships—and, perhaps, to see another path back to her marriage.

In this emotionally riveting novel, Carol Gilligan draws on her unsurpassed psychological understanding of women's lives to explore a new vision of love and intimacy. Sweeping across decades and continents, attuned to the rhythms of life and time, Solstice is a provocative and profound portrait of what it takes to truly love another.

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My Review: Plenty of buzz around this tale of a Holocaust survivor haunted by his myriad ghosts, the burgeoning dancer/life force he marries, the challenging marriage they undertake, and lots of Jewish history relevant to the present day.

My interest in straight peoples' intimacy is not large enough to support this latter aspect of the story as my focus. I was a great deal more interested in Eve's story of how dance could explain the myth of Adam and Eve. It was *wonderful* to read Author Gilligan's evocations of dance as an art form. Eve's learning of the deeper meanings, the cultural resonances, the eternal quality of myths with a rabbi's learnèd guidance after she splits from Gabe in 1991 was as involving as anything I've read this year.

It's mired in a relationship novel I don't care about, one that's intended to add another resonant frequency to the myth of Adam and Eve, but that ends up not doing that. If I was supposed to care about Eve and Gabe as a couple, why is Gabe so...amorphous? Their three kids are names, when every couple I have ever known (that has kids) honestly thinks and talks more about their kids than anything else.

Author Gilligan's a psychologist so these are clearly informed choices made with intent, not lacunae of understanding. As they did not make sense to me, I can't say her information came through to me in the novel she wrote. I'll forget these characters in a week, but will carry the passages describing dance with me.

FRUIT FLY, appropriation is appropriation, and it's always wrong

FRUIT FLY
JOSH SILVER
Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 11, 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.
A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

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My Review: Mallory appropriates a person's life story because she needs a bestseller. His story is plangently told for sympathy tears because he's been used hard and thrown aside by an uncaring world, left to rot under bridges without housing and unable to access needed treatment for his addictions. Mallory extracts Leo's story by telling lies and faking an identity aimed at piquing Leo's interest in targeting the fake for exploitation, trading sex for cash along the way. Then the really ugly fake begins...her impersonation of a therapist who will help Leo.

Because Mallory needs a bestselling novel idea that she can turn around quickly.

It's hard to overstate the ick that gave me as I read it in the synopsis, except to say it only gets worse as the story itself unfolds. I do mean "unfolds" as the stories of Mallory and Leo are multilayered and coming to light in slow steps, complementing each others' past traumas and shared senses of betrayal.

The language of therapy can hide as easily as it can reveal; the way one uses the techniques involved in therapy do not in and of themselves lead directly to miraculous healing. In these characters' case, neither separately and never the two together are using anything to do more than temporarily and incredibly facilely cope with genuine, terrible traumas. Neither is introspective by nature. You can't fuck for a living and be doing a whole lot of drugs to get it done and still feel on top of your emotional damage; and any writer who can't overcome writers' block by looking inward to see *why* instead of outward to see *what* as a reflex action is deeply, deeply damaged and needs lots of help.

The pair are entangled in a complicated system of interlocking denial told in their own separate voices...always wise to let the perp and the victim have equal access to the reader's attention. It's a loud response to the terrible A Little Life, shifting its ripping and tearing of emotions into bleeding gobbets into clumsy and careless slicing at cancerous infected flesh. It hasn't helped but it is the action that, with guidance, will help as opposed to the lethal wrongness of that other story.

What happens, though, is that the finger-wagging title...y'all know what a fruit fly is in gay circles, right?...and the darkly judgmental tone of her engagement with Leo wears on one's nerves as it drips out in unceasing small, acidic drops. These are not kind people to themselves or others so the novel's length works against it. Yes, I know more details of how terrible each of them is, but really? Do I genuinely need to know this much?

I was also informed the story had thriller elements but I'm not sure what they were. I can get behind a mystery definition of the read because it's a mystery to me why Mallory's husband is still alive and has his balls attached (he's pushing for a kid, so they gotta be there). It's also a mystery why Leo thought he was using Mallory as she strip-mined his life for usable raw materials in several guises; that's a shocking absence of street savvy for someone who makes a living turning tricks.

I found a certain wry amusement in reading the stories because I felt in on the joke, but that was tempered by the very clear and unsparing depictions of abuse and violence and self-harming ideation. It's done plainly, in adequate metaphorical lighting that enables we-the-reader to see the actions and activities without questioning "is that what I think it is?" Yep. It is. The authorial tone is quite unemphatically reporting what is really occurring. That's a virtue, it deprives the pearl-clutchers of their favorite line of criticism: sensationalized overblown etc etc.

It just goes on that little bit too long to be my personal ideal read. Maybe it'll be yours.

BLOOD OF THE DAWN, Peru's violent past made personal

BLOOD OF THE DAWN
CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Debut novel by Peruvian author viscerally revisits Peru's recent, traumatic history through the eyes of three women

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as "the time of fear" in Peruvian history, when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in a lucid and brutal prose.

Claudia Salazar Jiménez was born in 1975 in Lima, Peru. She is a critic, a scholar, and an author; she founded PERUFEST, the first Peruvian film festival in New York, where she lives; and she won the 2014 Americas Narrative Prize for this, her debut novel.

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My Review: A nasty proxy war was fought by the US versus the USSR as part of what we in the US are taught to call "the Cold War." How cold is a war whose victims number in the hundreds of thousands in one theater of its coldness, eg Latin America? Are people's families less fractured because no US soldiers (to speak of) were killed? Are those (mostly) men less dead because they weren't casualties of great pitched battles?

One nasty war was the struggle Peruvians fought against Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path in English), a Soviet-backed militia that committed atrocities against ordinary people with seeming success throughout the 1980s. The brutality of the US-backed military's responses to Sendero Luminoso drove some into the rebels' camp, others away from it. In any civil war there are no real winners. This was never more evident than in Peru. Author Salazar Jiménez limns that very clearly by decentering the male (mostly) combatants in favor of three women whose lives are both upended and defined by the conflict.

It's a depressing truth that this book came out in 2016, I read it in 2017, and while I made my notes on it at the time I never wrote them into a review. The biggest part of my failure to review it stems from the stream-of-consciousness narrative vignettes feeling unlinked-up. This is a debut, so it deserves generosity of treatment; however I was very, very irritated by the sense that, if there was a common thread in the background tapestry, I did not see it.

On skimming the story ten years later, I still don't. The PoV women are all enmeshed in the struggles of Peru, none on the government side but Melanie the city-born colonizer-stock photographer is probably closest as photography and its granddaughter filmmaking's very much an outgrowth of bourgeois culture more broadly; her desire to show the world what's happening to her country gets her resoundingly abused by Sendero Luminoso perpetrators. Her narrative voice wasn't distinctive, particularly in (unclear) distinction to Modesta the impoverished country-dwelling Quecha woman's.

That both were raped quite violently (there is no non-violent rape, I'm saying their experiences were even more violent than baseline horror) did not make them more distinguishable in a narrative technique used to emphasize the commonalities of sexualized assault. It served that function. a side-effect of that function is it's more difficult to build specific empathy for that character. As the story progresses, Modesta faces the challenge of carrying then birthing a daughter from her horrifying experience...a daughter she cannot easily or readily bond with. Since I'm more distant emotionally from her by not having a clear sense of her as Modesta but rather as a woman caught in war, it's harder for that horrific truth to make its most intense impact on me-the-reader.

Comrade Marta, the cadre of the Sendero Luminoso, was probably the one easiest to tell apart because she was seeing, participating in, perpetrating, but centrally seeing the violence her group committed as a necessary step to gaining meaningful freedom for the people of Peru. I got why she fell into that way of thinking, but it's always hard to see that path as justified to my bourgeois self. How does killing stop killing? I do not observe that result from those actions anywhere in my own world.

So my rating does not rest primarily on my pleasure in the prose from any angle. I would rate the book two and a half stars were it still 2016 out there. Today we have the US starting bullshit wars to protect a bunch of pedophile rapists from facing the consequences of their crimes instead of simply enriching some scumbags; we have a government so dedicated to white supremacist misogyny as policy instead of more nebulously ideology that voting rights and bodily autonomy are being dismantled as matters of law; we are, in short, more in danger from our government than from any external enemy.

In that sociopolitical milieu this book is four stars of klaxon-sounding warning. Heed these words, understand these threats viscerally by reading this story.

ETNA, not what you think no matter what you think you're thinking

ETNA
PAUL YOON
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

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My Review: Etna...volcano...Sicily's demi-Vesuvius.

No, Etna is a bright, sweet-tempered puppy whose evident cleverness gets him selected to assist the American troops in their conduct of war. Set in his homeland as it's destroyed, a woman with a gift of speaking after a fashion to animals' minds identifies this lovely creature as a helper for human destroyers. Named after the volcano by an American soldier, Etna's trained to be a mine-sniffing dog. He renders aid and saves lives to the best of his ability...and he's good at his job...until the war around him shifts.

Etna's alert, oriented, and intelligent. He makes his own mind up to leave the soldiers he's served, served with really, to go home. It's part of the story's charm that by them we've accepted Etna as our narrator, as an entity with thoughts and feelings and interiority we can invest in. He perceives the damaged soldiers around him, senses as any dog would the way they've changed with a dog's emotional sensitivity to people. As Etna leaves the soldiers' world behind he heads to wherever his memory says is home through a landscape he does not recognize, peopled by scarred, violent survivors.

A large part of the decision to invest in Etna's journey comes as we-the-reader settle into Author Yoon's pared-down narrative voice, unornamented while remaining emotionally evocative and visually rich. It makes sense that it would be this combination of traits because dogs perceive the world at an angle to human perceptions, which must somehow be conveyed to human readers in a way that makes sense to them. Had, for example, Author Yoon chosen to convey Etna's perceptions through smells it would fall flat. Humans barely have a sense of smell. (I myownself think that's an adaptation so we can live in cities....)

As Etna lives through destruction by making his mind up to get home, he interacts with the other animals around him in ways that feel natural by the time we get there narratively. Author Yoon does not put thoughts of literally incredible complexity into animals' perceptions. That makes the fact they're animals go down easier, makes the observations and perceptions make sense in their context. A good touch of realistic world-building is how only one human is ever shown communicating with Etna in a magically clear way. Etna's other interactions with humans feel sharp, clear, but never direct and magically clear; it's how I see dogs and intelligent sensitive people interacting daily as my neighborhood has a good-sized canine population.

The story takes place mostly in the aftermath of war so there is a lot of devastation in Etna's homebound path. A lot changes in a creature that survives violence by committing violence. In Etna's case he doesn't attack others but he defends himself and those he serves by necessary means. It will disturb you as you read the story. It is never gratuitous or prolonged for effect. Using Etna for a PoV character allows Author Yoon to present violence and consequences realistically resonant on the emotional level without lingering in the trauma left behind. Etna rediscovers human lovingkindness when he meets Hong and his doctor/partner, determinedly helping their fellow countrymen recover from wounds and diseases they never needed to suffer but for war coming to their world from outside.

In the summer of 2026, defined in good part by Christopher Nolan's retelling of The Odyssey, Paul Yoon hit a cultural jackpot by reimagining a homegoing quest in a unique way. That he did so successfully will, I strongly hope, boost this tight, compact, deeply moving story of a dog who needs to rediscover his purpose after war to the sales heights it deserves.