Category: Prize Winner

October 31, 2016

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald **** (of 4)

Three parallel stories expertly told. In the first, the author trains a goshawk to fly from her glove to hunt pheasants and rabbits on the British...

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October 20, 2016

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

This recounting of America’s dust bowl is a vivid, filthy painting of an American environmental disaster brought about by greed, hubris, and ignorance. After demolishing...

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September 28, 2016

The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff ** (of 4)

It is the middle of the fifth century, though you would have to know that on your own, as there is no indication in the...

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June 23, 2016

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson **** (of 4)

In so many ways Tree of Smoke is easier to describe for what it really is not. The setting is Vietnam, and to a lesser...

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May 1, 2016

The Incarnations by Susan Barker *** (of 4)

China, despite its rocket launch into modernity, is still a country of five thousand years of history. As Americans, a people that at best can only recall...

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April 8, 2016

Redeployment by Phil Klay *** (of 4)

Phil Klay’s short stories about Marine Corps life in Iraq and after Iraq begin so realistically that I had to check to confirm I was...

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February 7, 2016

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell **** (of 4)

This is a tale both microscopic in scope and biblical in scale. The scene is 1920s Illinois before the age of machines and corporations when...

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August 27, 2015

Age of Ambition by Edward Osnos *** (of 4)

Pieced together from Osnos’s eight years of reports on China filed with the New Yorker, Age of Ambition comes together as a complete painting of modern...

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August 2, 2015