Rooney has a gift for making real the pleasures of sex and intimacy— a shower in the morning while a close friend you’ve just had great...

Slim, bossy and erudite, this is one of the only practical books about poetry that I’ve read. Oliver demonstrates the techniques of...

What’s at stake in this novel is the simple happiness of our struggling writer protagonist. Love and work are what she seeks and there’s...

Seshadri’s fifth book of poems is wildly idiosyncratic, funny, varied in style. I found his preoccupations similar to Rankine’s in some...

This book—image, poem, essay— is part of a trilogy including Just Us and Citizen, is less about race and more about mental anguish. What...

Sue Miller’s novel is told not shown in the great tradition of Henry James, or George Eliot; the telling is psychological, fine tuned and...

This book, one of a trilogy, an amalgam of poetry, essay, excerpt and found image transformed my way of seeing race in the US. I felt...

Published February 21, 2020 | By thea His prose reminds me of Ishiguro’s in the best way; lyrical, precise, and correct. That...

Below is a project I did with artist, Diana Frid and musician, Mark Gallay in 2004 when I’d only loved in Chicago for 1 year.

Published April 19, 2019 | By thea The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt Nine Stories by JD Salinger After The Quake by Haruki Murakami Her Body...

Published October 24, 2017 | By thea This summer I read some startling poetry—Paschen, Kaschike, and Sinclair, 2 amazing debuts by...

Published December 12, 2016 | By thea Panel discussion of best books of the year. Dec. 16, 2016 at 7:30pm

Published December 12, 2016 | By thea Little Red Chairs, Edna O’Brien I had never read her before. I love her style and her depiction of...

Elena Ferrante’s 6 novels are painful, searing, addictive reading. Love. Can’t wait for the seventh novel (fourth after the Neopolitan...

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr. Reminicsent of The English Patient. (Haven’t finished this one yet.) Sarah Manguso,...

Published September 20, 2014 | By thea -Enormous Changes at The Last Minute by Grace Paley. She’s unique–vivid, brutal, syntactically...

Published September 27, 2013 | By thea Wild, by Cheryl Strayed Cheryl Strayed changed her name to “Strayed” when she couldn’t stop...

Published January 21, 2013 | By thea A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver I read this book in one sitting, prone on the couch, drained by...

Everyone kept telling me to read this book and now I understand the miracle of it. The crippled historian who narrates the book is...

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger In Amina, a Bangladeshi woman, new to this country, Nell Freudenberger has created a character with a...

A Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes The dialogue among childhood friends—British, bookish boys in the 60’s—provides a full sense of...

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross “I think you’re obsessed with him,” my oldest friend told me over lunch when I told her about the book for the...

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter There is a mole on a young, French girl’s neck and she works in a patisserie. It’s all conjecture...

Sugar in My Bowl essays edited by Eric Jong OK so it’s a funny list of summer reading, I know, but I’m an aesthete and a feminist. And I...

Open City by Teju Cole Teju Cole is not pretentious.  As a writer, art historian, photographer, novelist and an intellectual, he is the...

Remainder by Tom McCarthy Remainder is a rare novel that is both seemingly simple and ultimately profound.  In basic increments we hear...

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox Desperate Characters was published in 1970 yet amazes with it’s timely portrait of malaise and fear in...

The Keep by Jennifer Egan All great novels are about time.  No matter what their overt content-- friendship, castles, death, or love...

I admit, I never listened to her music, or saw any of her drawings, or ingested any of her art in any form, until I read Just Kids, her...

Emily Gray Tedrowe is a superb writer gracefully weaving in minute detail while maintaining the pace of this fantastic, naturalistic...

Of course you know about the power point presentation within this text. (If you don't there is one and it's brilliant, funny and eerily...

People are types and they are also much more than that (or less than that as the case may be.) Characters attest to be real but they...

By turns lyrical and colloquial, Michael Cunningham's prose gracefully elucidates ways of thinking, specifically the ways of Peter and...

Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic These poems juxtapose grand proclamations about eternity, the divine, and immortality with lines like,...

The Dead and the Living poems by Sharon Olds I'm reading poetry to reconnect to language (above story) and to emotion that fuels writing....

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon I’m riveted by this novel’s fractured and deceptively simple structure. It’s both sensational---there’s a...

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon I’m riveted by this novel’s fractured and deceptively simple structure. It’s both sensational---there’s a...