Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins 5 stars, provisional. This novel is an absolutely stunning tour de force, with one important exception, to...

Antonio Damasio's Descarte's Error Damasio opens with the intriguing historical case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker whose frontal...

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere Four stars. The two bad guys in Gaiman’s fantasy novel are very bad, so bad that they nearly take over the novel...

William Kennedy's Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Kennedy gets compared to many writers, but I think that he and Faulkner are dead-ringers....

Flan O’Brian, At swim-two-birdsI once received a story rejection that in part read, "I feel strange rejecting a story that made me spew...

Jim Sanderson's Nothing To Lose Four stars. Voice, voice, voice; setting, setting, setting—both come at you from the get-go in this...

Wallace's Big Fish 5 stars Daddy Problems? Read on! If you’ve seen the Movie Big Fish, you might want to try the book, if for no other...