Category: Micro-Reviews

The two youngest members of the Glass family are both actors. Franny is having a nervous breakdown and muttering a Catholic prayer like an earnest acolyte. Zooey, her big brother, is there to counsel her, but he isn’t helping. “We’re freaks, the two of us,” …

Inspired by last week’s BANANAFISH, we turn our attention to the Glass family chronicles: in particular, Seymour Glass, the oldest of seven precocious children of showbiz parents. What makes Seymour tick? Why would this brilliant, ridiculously educated polyglot choose to exit the world? He clearly …

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, …