Newsletter #402

I was charmed into reading this novel by its first pages, in which a self-sabotaging former ad exec revels in the slushy city beauty of a Minnesota December as he trudges to his weekly group therapy a... (Tom)

"If you make a call on a banana phone, who will answer?" The boy in this picture book finds out when he strikes up a long-distance friendship with a gorilla. Emily Hughes's soft-looking illustrations... (Haley)

Shanbhag's debut here, Ghachar Ghochar, was one of the first novels written in Kannada, a language spoken by tens of millions in southwestern India, to be translated into English. His second, also tra... (Tom)

The arrival of full shelves of Persephone Books was one of the highlights of our year, so it seemed appropriate to close 2025 by choosing a Persephone book—in one of their slightly less expensive but... (Tom)

On one hand, this is, like many memoirs, the story of a curious, ambitious child and a flawed, fascinating parent. The son of a white American mother and a father—a brilliant, larger-than-life, and of... (Tom)