Posts by Kevin Nguyen
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October Book Recommendations: The Middlesteins, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and The Dream of Doctor Bantam
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg After 30 years of marriage, Richard Middlestein leaves his wife Edie, a lawyer whose lifelong love of food has slowly but surely pushed her weight above 350 pounds. This is the setup for The Middlesteins, an honest, hilarious portrait of a fractured Jewish family in the Midwest. Throughout September, I’d […]
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September Book Recommendations: This Is How You Lose Her, My Heart Is an Idiot, The Signal and the Noise
This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz In college, I had a creative writing professor who claimed Junot Díaz had read 100 short-story collections before he penned a single word of his first book of stories, Drown. That professor (or maybe it was a friend of hers) later met Díaz and asked him […]
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August Book Recommendations: The Devil in Silver, Every Day and We Sinners
The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle For Pepper, what should be a 72-hour stay at the New Hyde Hospital’s psych ward turns into a prolonged, drug-induced incarceration. But as a troublemaker with a cynical edge, the mental institution gives Pepper the chance to confront his personal demons. And also a real demon. New Hyde, […]
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July Book Recommendations: Tiny Beautiful Things, The Last Policeman, and Office Girl
Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed Cheryl Strayed will be best known for her memoir Wild, released earlier this year and, last month, featured as the first pick of Oprah’s relaunched book club. But this month, Strayed has an equally terrific book out, Tiny Beautiful Things, which collects the best pieces from her anonymous advice […]
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June Book Recommendations: The Age of Miracles, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and Shadow and Bone
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker The Age of Miracles is about the end of the world, both in a macro and micro sense. The Earth’s rotation begins to slow, stretching the length of days and nights and warping the planet’s gravity. But the potential of astronomical apocalypse mostly sets the stage for a […]
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May Book Recommendations: Billy Lynn, Home, and The Kissing List
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one football game, featuring a halftime show to honor Bravo Squad, whose bravery in Iraq was captured on tape by an embedded Fox News team. But while the members of Bravo are constantly being hailed as heroes, it’s clear […]
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April Book Recommendations: Paris, Pastors, and Punishment
Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James Right now, the most popular non-Hunger Games book series in the country is Fifty Shades of Grey, a trilogy of explicit erotic novels that features lots of dominance and submission. The series started humbly self-published and was recently acquired for seven figures by Random House, which thinks it […]
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March Book Recommendations: The Vanishers, Hot Pink, and The Thief
The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits The Vanishers is a clever, metaphysical detective story about a young psychic named Julia who is haunted by the death of her mother. But The Vanishers is anything but hard-boiled — it’s a funny, affecting novel about girls being really passive-aggressive to one another. If you think about it, using […]
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Book Review: Haruki Murakami’s Highly Satisfying, Only Semi-Mesmerizing 1Q84
I used to own every single Haruki Murakami novel and short story collection in paperback. But when I went to my bookshelf a few weeks ago, I realized that I only had two left. The rest had been borrowed and never returned, which either says a lot about Murakami’s popularity or the kind of company […]
