The premise here is simple, yet its importance is impossible to overstate—men gazing at women creates a toxic environment, and male photographers have always posed their female subjects to please men, perpetuating a narrow expression... Read More

A great memoir offers the-rest-of-the-story appeal, and when the CIA, 9/11, waterboarding, whistleblowing, scapegoating, coverups, and federal prison all factor in, the page turning reaches hyperdrive. John Kiriakou spent fifteen years... Read More

"Crossing Ebenezer Creek" is a poignant historical novel about the meaning of freedom and the heartache of dreams. In it, Tonya Bolden has woven a haunting Civil War tale. The novel starts with an eerie reference to ghosts, ghosts that... Read More

The legend of the Golem is brought to modern-day Yonkers, New York, in the graphic novel "Brik", by Adam Glass, Michael Benson, and Harwinder Singh. After twelve-year-old Drew loses his grandfather to gang violence, he successfully... Read More

In her consistent ability to write a perfect line of poetry—and the river rose thirty-three feet above the highway and took what it wanted, and it wanted nearly everything, and left just the sidewalks—Gillian Wegener upsets the idea... Read More

Tension. Simmering. —Beneath her matter-of-fact, easy-going, sit-yourself-down, let-me-tell-it-like-it-is chatifying. And her power we take deadly seriously. Camille T. Dungy is a Fort Collins, Colorado, essayist and author of three... Read More

Stand your ground and make thoughtful observations—carefully, and with aplomb. Ben Berman repeatedly delivers on this not-so-easy dictum. He ain’t no bum. A fan of Dante’s terza rima rhyme schemes, Berman’s early book, Strange... Read More

No, we won’t find much comfort here, or words pretty for pretty’s sake. Sheila McMullin scores the flesh of her observations and sears them with ponderous, mostly unanswerable questions about pain and anger, consequences, finality.... Read More