Southern Review of Books

At the center of Louise Marburg’s comic novel, Fancy Meeting You, is a high-functioning alcoholic, Laura Harrigan. Living well below her aptitude as a Harvard graduate, she often calls in sick — hungover — to her job fact-checking textbooks. She concede...

Ann Patchett’s novels examine the bonds and secrets of families — those connected by blood, forged through marriage, and built between strangers as they weather difficult circumstances. Her latest, Whistler, is no different. It is told with Patchett’s t...

If we are lucky, we get to have that magical experience of coming across the right book exactly when we need it. I experienced this kind of rarity with Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest collection of poetry, Night Owl.

Night Owl first ca...

Last spring, I had the honor of reading The Bright Years by novelist Sarah Damoff, so I knew as soon as the ARC became available for her second novel,

A man awakens from a coma. He can barely speak, he doesn’t know who he is, he doesn’t know where he is, and the two other members of his crew have not survived the induced comas. The clinical setting gives him no clues until he finds a window staring directly into outer space.