Reading Hounded: Stories From the American Road by British journalist Alan Emmins gives a vital insight into the little-seen sights of everyday America, from small-town meth labs to bounty hunters and the aching sadness of a long-distance ride on a chaotic Greyhound bus.
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The Great Passage by Shion Miura is a novel about a group of editors compiling a dictionary. If you’re looking for a fast-moving plot with plenty of action, this is not the book for you. But if you love language and are willing to be patient, it holds plenty of rewards. When I say this is a novel about compiling a dictionary, I don’t mean that the dictionary compiling is a loose frame for a more exciting story. I mean that it really is about the details of the dictionary,… Read More
Race and capitalism in America should be fertile ground for literary fiction. This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy brought the usual bout of stabbings and shootings to add to the overall death count, not to mention the looming environmental collapse that such consumerism feeds. And the list of things you can’t do while black without having the police called or a gun pulled on you seems to expand by the day, from working out to moving into an apartment to buying Mentos. Yet Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah startled me by the… Read More