[Reviewlet] An Unexpected Guest, by Anne Korkeakivi
by Erika Dreifus
Can’t make it to Paris this spring? Don’t worry. Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel, An Unexpected Guest , delivers armchair travel fresh as a fragrant baguette.
Can’t make it to Paris this spring? Don’t worry. Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel, An Unexpected Guest , delivers armchair travel fresh as a fragrant baguette.
Doomed love with a dark twist. Lush historical details elevate Ron Rash’s The Cove.
With her debut novel, Regina O’Melveny’s heroine embarks on a journey through Renaissance Europe. Indebted to The Bard, the book inhabits many worlds worth exploring.
Our latest Journal of the Week, Lapham’s Quarterly, is a true curator of culture. By juxtaposing the old and the new, Carolyn Gan says in this profile, it’s the “literary equivalent of a really good mix tape, where obscure songs of various styles come together to tell you something more about the music.”
Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, gorgeously renders a commune’s rise, fall, and life-long resonance for the people who grew up within it. Unfolding as a series of snapshots, the book’s events span the birth of this late-1960s utopia and its central character, Bit Stone, to his middle age in a bleak—and imminent—dystopic future.
The Dutch author Nescio wrote little, quite rarely, and under a pseudonym that means “I don’t know” – yet he’s quite famous in Holland. In the first English translation of his major stories, a group of poor artists struggle to make sense of Amsterdam between the wars. The world is changing out from under them – sound familiar?
Winner of the 2009 Dzanc Prize, Eugene Cross puts his winnings to good use with his incendiary debut collection Fires of Our Choosing. With a knack for crystalline, precise moments, Cross pins down characters along the Lake Erie shoreline like a knife thrower at the top of his game.
Michael Griffith’s latest novel captures the last twenty minutes of a man’s life: Vada finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, but this book gives good pathos, too.
1983. Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. A horrific incident that haunts the Kenney siblings for decades to come. Jennifer Taylor calls Carol Anshaw’s new novel, Carry the One, a “compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.”
The uncanny controls the palette in Stay Awake, a short-story collection showcasing a writer in mid-career who is not simply at the top of his game, but who refuses to settle.
Prodigals on a grand scale who don’t want to go home. Matt Mullins packs 25 stories into his high-velocity debut Three Ways of the Saw. Don’t be misled by the Zenlike title, these characters come at you like a karate chop to the windpipe. Read on to find out exactly why you’ll be thanking him for that bruised trachea.
Like a hard layer of permafrost, longing and grief lie beneath the surface in Jack Driscoll’s new collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago. Driscoll’s richly flawed characters toe that fine line between optimism against long odds and outright delusion.
