A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. - Coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976 ... Read More...
The Blazing World
Sometimes all it takes is a name and the die is cast. For Harriet Burden, the fact that her father called her Harry from a young age felt like a challenge; one that she grabs onto with all the tenacity of a pit bull, even when it causes her nothing but pain. Harriet is the protagonist in Siri Hustvedt’s new novel, The Blazing World, a tour-de-force of one woman’s determination ... Read More...
Amity & Sorrow
Earlier in the year I reviewed a novel (The Visionist) where a mother and her children run for safety to a religious compound. In Peggy Riley’s Amity & Sorrow it is the opposite situation. Amaranth and her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow, are running from their compound because its founder, Amaranth’s husband, has decided it is the end days and has set it on fire so they ... Read More...
We Are Water: A Novel
How a work can be solid and delicate, earthy and of air is a mystery but describes Wally Lamb’s novel, We Are Water. Ostensibly it is the story of Annie Oh—wife, mother, artist and keeper of secrets, secrets that grow and beget other secrets, changing her life and the lives around her. When she is only five, she watches as her mother is swept away by a flood, along with her ... Read More...
Lexicon: A Novel
There is no introduction in Max Barry’s novel Lexicon. From page one where two men have inserted a needle into another man’s eye in an airport bathroom the reader is flung hard into a wholly different world. A compulsively readable, high speed, freakishly intelligent world. I read Lexicon during a 24-hour read-a-thon and it was the perfect novel for it because I didn’t want to ... Read More...
Cartwheel
Maybe that was the problem with this family—they were all in direct competition with one another to see who could bend over backward the farthest, who could suffer the most. Jennifer Dubois’ new novel, Cartwheel, is as knotted and tangled as the judicial system itself. Add the fact that it takes place in a foreign country and you have the makings of a novel that will grip ... Read More...
