Published by Hogarth Press, 2016, 320 pages. Margaret Atwood never disappoints, and this reworking of The Tempest (as part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press) is no exception. Felix, the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival in Canada, has been working on what he believes is his masterpiece, an over-the-top production of The Tempest. …
Month: November 2018
Lincoln in the Bardo: George Saunders
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, 368 pages. While the American Civil War was raging, Abraham Lincoln lost his 11-year-old son, Willie to typhoid. It is said that for a few nights after Willie’s death, Lincoln, grief-stricken, used to go to the crypt to hold his son’s body. George Saunders takes this sliver of history and …
My Name is Leon: Kit de Waal
Published by Viking / Penguin, 2016, 288 pages. When we first meet him, Leon is 8 years old, going on 9. He is in the hospital with his mother Carol, holding his baby brother, Jake, for the first time. This first scene sets up the way things are going to be: Leon holding his new …
Not So Stories: edited by David Thomas Moore
Published by Abaddon, 2018, 368 pages. When I was a child, I loved Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, tales of how animals became what they are: how the leopard got its spots, the camel its hump and the rhinoceros its skin. But it’s a book that doesn’t age well. Kipling, after all, was part of …
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