Author: stevenowad

These stories by Holden Caulfield’s creator are 1950s New York through and through. Elevated language and smooth storytelling rhythms are layered atop subtext heaving with moneyed angst, the horrors or war, and Hindu mysticism. Even with all this going on, some of these stories are …

Emergency review this week. A troglodytic school board in Tennessee has banned this 1992 graphic novel. That’s a good reason to remind everyone how brilliant and necessary the book is. The stated cause of the ban: profanity and nudity. The real reason: we’ll leave you …

A haunting play about finding justice in a new democracy after decades of dictatorship. Paulina, a former political prisoner and victim of brutal torture, takes her husband’s newest friend hostage. Roberto is a doctor who may or may not have been Paulina’s main tormentor under …

This is an arresting chronicle about what it is to be indigenous in Canada—about growing up hard in a place of crime, addiction and sexual abuse. It’s about facing down a community’s shattered past and a country’s ingrained racism. To transcend these things, as Thomas-Muller …

This picaresque novel about a flatulent, misanthropic and objectively loathsome young man in early 1960s New Orleans would never get published in today’s world of woke groupthink. Consider some of the characters: a radical Jewish princess, a ditzy stripper, flaming “sodomites,” violently angry lesbians, and …

A viscerally shocking novel about a young boy’s odyssey through eastern Europe during World War II. In wandering from village to village, the dark-skinned boy encounters hatred and persecution from mainly white Christian rural folk. The violence and sexual abuse are appalling but easily committed, …

It’s a gross understatement to call this a story about a troubled marriage. George and Martha live in a New England university town in the 1960s. Their marriage doesn’t crumble so much as it bursts and shatters and then bursts and shatters again. Language is …

A classic tale about a young man’s search for meaning after the insanity of World War I. Larry Darrell gives up wealth and the woman he loves in order to seek meaning through religion. What follows is a journey of discovery to Paris and India, …

This thriller is set in the early 1990s during the demise of the Soviet Union. Three Soviet spies in Washington find themselves adrift once communism ends. Who’s in charge back home? Do the old rules of spycraft apply? Most important, are old friends and colleagues …

Sometimes when the American drive toward autocracy is getting you down, you just have to give yourself over to Uncle Noam. This book lets you know you’re not alone in your sense of horror. It focuses on America’s role in the world in the early …