The Interestings

In 1974, six teenagers meet at an arts camp in the Berkshires. The privileged brother and sister duo, Ash and Goodman Wolf, are at the center of the group. Cathy Kiplinger is the sexy dancer who’s attending camp on scholarship; she and Goodman have a passionate and sometimes explosive fling going on. Jonah Bay is

Quickies: A Guide to Being Born & The Great Gatsby

A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel Publisher/Year: Riverhead, 2013 Format: ARC Pages: 208 Source: Publisher What it is: A collection of eleven strange short stories related to the cycle of life. The stories are organized into four themes: birth, gestation, conception, and love. Why I read it: Ausubel has been on my radar

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini’s latest novel, And the Mountains Echoed, begins with a bedtime story about a difficult decision. Could a father give up his favorite child in order to save all of his other children, even though it would mean a certain death for his favorite child? The story sets the tone for the rest of

The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories

Zombies, merciless shrinking spouses, and intergalactic warfare…just another typical day for the characters in Manuel Gonzales’s debut short story collection, The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories. The eighteen stories in this collection are at turns darkly humorous and really strange, throwing readers for a loop in very unexpected ways. The book pretty much had me

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

Contrary to what more than a few online reactions would have you believe, in no way does Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men imply that the obliteration of men and the rise of an all-powerful, misandrist matriarchy is imminent. Let’s just get that out of the way right up front. The provocative title stems from an article