By Nancy SmithThe Lonely City—part memoir, part art history, part sociological investigation—is a book that is ostensibly about loneliness. However, it often wanders into the vast, complex territory that surrounds the lonely person: authenticity, openness, curiosity,...
By Nancy Smith
Matt Bell’s intriguing new book, Scrapper, follows Kelly, a former boxer who has returned to his ruined hometown of Detroit.
By Nancy Smith
Sidewalks landed on my desk during the usual end-of-semester rush. I had several essays due, a stack of papers to grade, and a research project to wrap up. And then summer came.
By Nancy Smith
Warren Motte has been collecting literary mirror scenes for the past twenty-five years—a remarkable, if somewhat curious, undertaking. Motte, a devoted reader who absorbs “a healthy mix of so-called ‘serious literature’ and so-called ‘popular literature,’ ” has kept 3×5 notecards within each book to record the author, title, and page of each encountered mirror scene. His fascinating new book, Mirror Gazing, is a lovely reflection on these many mirror scenes and the peculiar pursuit of collecting.
By Nancy Smith
Only a few paragraphs into This Is Between Us, it becomes clear that this is an intimate portrait of a relationship. A narrator speaks, perhaps confesses, directly to his lover of five years, and we get to peek inside the everyday details of this romance.