So if there wasn’t enough tension and the stakes weren’t high enough in Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue (there was, and they were) now we’re given One Last Stop: a girl lost in time and a romance that’s destined to be a missed connection. Good to the last drop! Just like RW&RB it …
When I attended college in the early 1960s, I majored in history and minored in art history/appreciation (no drawing classes). When I saw a mention of An Exquisite Corpse by art historian Helen A. Harrison, I was hoping I would like it. In a word, it was awesome. The story takes place in New York …
If you’ve ever struggled to lead a creatively satisfying professional life, there’s a good chance Cass’s story will resonate. Cass’s chosen career path? Theater. After an entire decade of working on “weird downtown plays” as a no-name playwright in NYC, she wins an award along with $50,000 and lands herself an off-Broadway debut. She’s 33 …
A delightful expose’ of the famous Barbizon Hotel for Women in NY City, the place where ambitious young women could live safely and in style while beginning their careers. Famous residents included the Unsinkable Molly Brown, Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and many others. The women arrived with high hopes and great …
Published originally in 1932, and said to be the first detective novel by an African-American author, this witty, shrewdly plotted whodunit (recently reissued) was penned by Rudolph Fisher, a New York City radiographer, short-story writer, and musician, active in the Harlem Renaissance. It tosses us onto the hectic scene of a nighttime slaying, the victim …
The Paragon Hotel has been my favorite historical fiction recommendation since it first published. It has so many things to love, a daring escape across the country, a crime to solve, a child to find, and characters to love. Set in segregated Oregon, you’ll find out things you never knew, while turning the pages as …
An anti-capitalist zombie narrative / coming-of-age that highlights the immigrant experience and the bleakness of the “millennial condition.” You’ve never read a dystopian like this. It’s moving, horrific, and humorous. –Kathryn, Browsers Bookshop, Olympia, WA Bring home something unexpected from a visit to Browsers Bookshop and other independent bookstores.
This book was recommended to me by a trusted source. The source was right. I was not familiar with the writings of Chris Pavone, but now I am a fan. The Expats is set in Luxembourg, primarily, but takes the reader to Paris, Geneva, New York City and Washington, D.C. The primary “good guys” are …
Have you ever read a book that you finish and say you are a different person when you finish it? That’s this book. There are books that are powerful and important, and then there are books that are POWERFUL and IMPORTANT. This is the latter. This book impacted me on all levels. Beautiful, romantic, smart, …
For whatever reason (having nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that publishing is dominated by intellectually aspirant professionals who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn), the New York novel is a fixture of every publishing season. Some people can’t get enough of them, some find them insufferable, and never the twain shall meet. Until now. …
