Hiro Hattori has a problem: he needs to find the murderer of an important guest ASAP. But the suspects are all people he doesn’t want to give up. Like his mother. Or his ex-lover. As time runs out, what is he going to do? “Betrayal at Iga” is set in 16th-century Japan, and is full […]
Read more "“Betrayal at Iga” by Susan Spann"In this eye-witness account of the events in Iraq from 2003 to 2008, Richard Engel, NBC correspondent for the Middle East, repeatedly asks the question that others should have been asking a lot earlier and a lot louder: namely, what the heck was the US doing there? This is a personal account of Engel’s experiences […]
Read more "“War Journal” by Richard Engel"A tragic car accident changes Lisa’s life forever. Just not in the way she thinks. She believes it has left her scarred, infertile, and doomed to be childless and alone. But she keeps crossing paths with the green-eyed boy who pulled her from the wreck. Is it fate? Meanwhile, James’s dream of being a surgeon […]
Read more "“Lives Collide” by Kristina Beck"Higher education has been in a parlous state for some time now, and the higher you go up the food chain, degree-wise, the more parlous it is. Although Loren Mayshark’s experience is unusually bad, it is symptomatic of the kinds of problems that grad students can expect to face, and is a cautionary tale for […]
Read more "“Academic Betrayal” by Loren Mayshark"In this interesting if highly disturbing read, James E. Mitchell, one of the chief architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program and introducer of waterboarding to the program, gives his side of the story and describes the techniques used, the interrogations conducted, and the intelligence gathered as a result. Mitchell brings up a number of […]
Read more "“Enhanced Interrogation” by James E. Mitchell"“The New Voices of Fantasy” is an eclectic mixture of diverse fantasy authors, featuring a multitude of subgenres in stories set around the globe. Although the short story format means that the worlds and cultures the authors have created appear only in snippet form, which is not normally my favorite way to experience fantasy, this […]
Read more "“The New Voices of Fantasy”"“Forgotten Reflections” tells two stories: one of feisty village girl Iseul, trying to survive during the Korean War, and the other of her granddaughter Jia, who goes on a quest to find out about her dying grandmother’s past instead of studying for her end-of-school exams like the dutiful, obedient girl her mother wants her to […]
Read more "“Forgotten Reflections” by Young-Im Lee"What can I say about Politkovskaya that I haven’t already said? Maybe that this book, written specifically for publication abroad, is perhaps the most foreigner-friendly of her works. Unlike “A Dirty War,” which is a compilation of her early articles on the second Chechen war, or later books such as “A Russian Diary,” which are […]
Read more "“Putin’s Russia” by Anna Politkovskaya"What a fabulous find! I’d never read any Estonian literature before encountering this book, so naturally I jumped at the chance. It’s the late 1690s, and Laurentius Hylas, accompanied only by his parakeet Clodia, has come from Lieden, where he ran into trouble at the university there for his unusual views, to the University of […]
Read more "“The Willow King” by Meelis Friedenthal, trans. Matthew Hyde"“The Bedlam Stacks” is an enchanting mixture of historical fiction and fantasy. It’s 1860, and Merrick Tremayne, former employee–read: smuggler-of the East India Company, now an invalid, is sitting around in his family estate, which is falling down around his ears. When his old boss invites him to go on an expedition to Peru to […]
Read more "“The Bedlam Stacks” by Natasha Pulley"
E. P. Clark: Author, Book Reviewer, and All-Around Literary Handiwoman 