Massachusetts Review Inc : 13 books

"Chaotic Freedom" is the story of two men transformed for the better through the Civil War. It is also the biography of an iconic photograph. The men are printer and newspaper publisher Henry S. Gere and currier and carpenter Marshall S. Stearns, both from western Massachusetts. The photograph...

In contemporary South Korea, the nuclear family has given way to individual urban living.  Yun Ko Eun sharply captures the dissonance of solitary life in a culture that prizes community and family. In an effort to navigate this 21st century conundrum, her narrator takes rigorous, highly structured...

TIME SERVED explores the plight of military veterans deported after serving time for felonies. In this searing investigative report, J. Malcolm Garcia asks the question, "What makes someone American?" Garcia follows four deported vets as they work to return to their families and the country...

In three interlocking stories, Dinika Amaral explores the fantasy and frustrations of post-colonial India. Weaving together the experiences of western visitors, the bustle of a contemporary Bombay marketplace, and figures from sacred Hindu texts, Amaral offers a mercurial, dreamlike vision of Bombay...

A young woman living alone sees a mysterious older woman roaming the woods outside her house. As they strike up an unlikely friendship, the narrator finds herself questioning what she knows about love, friendship, and family. Lee Upton’s most recent books are Bottle the Bottles the Bottles...

"The way [Guy Debord] used détournement in those years confirms what we already suspected about the deeper roots of his being: he needed others, he needed those marble statues, in order to make himself known, both as one and many. Détournement was a ritual through which images of others magically...

Eduardo Halfon's "Tomorrow We Never Did Talk About It" follows closely the departure of a well-off industrialist Jewish family from Guatemala in the early 1980s. The events are seen from the point of view of the naive, inquisitive ten-year-old son. In Anne McLean's vivid translation, the...

THE LEADER follows three generations of a Libyan family during the reign of Muammar Gaddafi, moving back and forth in time over the course of nearly forty years as it traces the ways that violence and repression echo through each member's life. Read an excerpt here and purchase on Kobo, Amazon or...

JUST ANOTHER JIHADI JANE follows the radicalization of two young girls growing up in a working-class Muslim neighborhood in the UK. Ameena and Jamilla become close followers of a Jihadi matron deeply involved in the Syrian insurrection—serving a cause they believe has been distorted by Western media....

Meet Mayhew, protagonist of Pete Duval's "Strange Mercies." Once upon a time in a faraway, Spanish-speaking land, Mayhew has a job to do: document via videotape a young woman whose Christ-like wounds bleed on cue and without scientific explanation, whose street-preacher performances might...

Much Ado About Everything is Gary Amdahl's full-throated defense of the novel as a technology of mystery, means by which we might second-handedly engage not only (as one of Amdahl's exemplary figures memorably put it) "nothing that is not there but also the nothing that is." Amdahl's energetic...

THE KEEPERS OF THE GHOST BIRD chronicles the astonishing rediscovery of the Bermuda petrel, believed to have been extinct since 1625. It is the story of a tenacious bird and the naturalists who now fight to save it, amid the degradation of habitat in Bermuda. Dean’s tale of unlikely resurrection...

"Emergency Exit" unfolds in the disjointed chronology of the perpetually jet-lagged, skipping over months as easily as airplanes cross time zones. In the slight surreality of this enclosed world, Carissa Halston's stewardesses reveal themselves as dark, complicated, fully realized human beings, capable of rage, apathy, humor, compassion, efficiency. . . even friendship.