A hearty “bless your heart” to those who misunderstand the South, the essays of Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, at Last vivify an often maligned region. Renkl is one angle of the face of the changing South: she cares about the... Read More

Greg Bourke’s remarkable memoir "Gay, Catholic, and American" is about how he and his husband became plaintiffs in one of the most pivotal Supreme Court cases in LGBTQ+ history. Bourke and his husband, Michael, met in college and... Read More

Jonathan Wells was small as a child—short, but also quite thin. That trait, the way others reacted to it, and its nonconformity with perceived male norms led to a painful chain reaction of events that Wells captures in his excellent... Read More

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the exchange rate for social media selfies? Patrick Nathan’s provocative, sometimes jarring book "Image Control" explores the destabilization of relationships that results when... Read More

Gideon Defoe analyzes, memorializes, and lampoons world history in "An Atlas of Extinct Countries". Defoe writes that all countries depend on myths to justify their existence and inspire loyalty in their people. Even after a country... Read More

Paula Bomer’s stark historical novel is set among the detritus left behind when the Berlin Wall fell. After World War II, Eva and her husband, Hugo, made the natural choice to live in the GDR, reasoning that communists saved him from... Read More

Barrett Swanson’s eloquent book "Lost in Summerland" combines personal essays, journalism, and travelogues into a memorable collection. The book opens with “Notes from a Last Man,” which at first seems to be an essay about spending... Read More