An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.
By Michael Malone Alex, protagonist of Emma Cline novel “The Guest,” is, in a sense, no one’s guest. She’s an escort in New York City, then steals from her dodgy boss and her roommates and gets booted out of her
Read MoreBy Michael Malone The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles, sets up as a road-trip book. It is 1954, and 18-year-old Emmett is sprung from a juvenile work farm out in the sticks. The facility warden drives him home in Nebraska.
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Kurt Vonnegut is an unassailable American cultural hero. There’s Slaughterhouse-Five, about Billy Pilgrim traveling through time, and the firebombing of Dresden. There’s Galapagos, about apocalypse survivors in the Galapagos Islands who start a new human race. There’s
Read MoreI truly loved Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s bizarre novel about a family of carnival freaks. The Binewski family includes parents who shape their collection of oddballs, such as a boy with flippers for limbs, Siamese twins and an albino hunchback,
Read MoreAfterparties, a collection of nine somewhat connected short stories detailing the lives of Cambodian-Americans in California, was written by Anthony Veasna So. One can’t help but read the book with a sense of sadness, because So died, at 28, of
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story is U2 singer Bono’s life story, set amidst the framework of 40 U2 songs, including old ones like “Out of Control” and “I Will Follow”, and newer stuff such as “Breathe” and
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Maybe you’re like me. Your kids bring home a novel they’re reading for school, and you start to think about when you read it in school, and you wonder how it holds up. It happened to me
Read MoreWhat I’m reading, and why By Michael Malone I break from my column’s moniker to share about a non-fiction book, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar. It is about Matar’s journey home to Libya
Read MoreBy Michael Malone And the Mountains Echoed comes from Khaled Hosseini, whose novels are set in Afghanistan. The book offers a unique structure–ten or so tangentially connected stories that form an unconventional novel, each one featuring a character or two
Read MoreBy Michael Malone Someone Else’s Life, a thriller from Lyn Liao Butler, is about Annie, who has recently arrived in Hawaii with her husband and young son, following a frightening incident back in Westchester County. That Annie lived in Westchester
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