Author: stevenowad

Hemingway’s mostly factual ode to his years in Paris after World War I. The events take place a full century ago, and at times the various wisdoms are outdated, but this is still a great read, with the energy of youth even though it was …

The title tells the story. Ageing professor David Kepesh fears his impending decline and death but is also fiercely attracted to a young student one-third his age. Before you think, “Well, here’s another whiny confession by an old, white male lusting after a young thing,” …

Before he gave us movies such as IN BRUGES and THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI,” Martin McDonagh was one of the coolest playwrights on the planet. This play, about an outrageously weird criminal looking for the hand that was cut off his arm and then …

Yet another book about the Mafia? Is there really anything left to say? Only if you like spending time in this corner of the true crime universe. The book follows the rise and fall of a mobbed-up union leader in 1970s Cleveland. “Irishman” Danny Greene …

Presidential memoirs are notoriously guarded exercises in protecting the author’s image. Uncomfortable truths are suppressed. Important backstories are ignored. Anecdotes are anodyne. This book is no different. Despite Obama’s obvious brilliance, charm and eloquence, he’s clearly determined to keep the reader at arm’s length. For …

To mark the milestone of our 50th review, we present the best novel ever written. This earth-shattering work is unrivalled in every way imaginable. Thomas Pynchon wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Any author who reads Owad’s work and doesn’t retreat to the …

This book by a medical examiner in New York fairly reeks of formaldehyde—but in a good way. Melinek guides us through homicides and suicides and John Doe cases without glorying in gore and without losing respect for the dead. She brings us into the autopsy …

A curveball this week: a sixty-year-old play that’s nothing like the plays that get written today. The story follows a defrocked minister who’s having a nervous breakdown triggered by weakness of the flesh. It’s a story about wounded souls at the end of their ropes—about …

The account of a Canadian-Egyptian journalist who was jailed in Egypt for the crime of being a journalist during a time of political upheaval. As Al Jazeera’s Cairo bureau chief, Fahmy commits the unpardonable sin of reporting facts. For his troubles, he is denounced as …

This biography of America’s most famous literary recluse touches on all the main aspects of the writer’s life, from growing up as the son of a buttoned-down pork importer to the instant fame that followed The Catcher in the Rye to his later years as …