The Other Beautiful People by Caroline Bock (Regal House Publishing). Reviewed by Sarahlyn Bruck. “My advice? Put any expectations about plot to the side. In this book, what Bock offers instead is a close study of how career and family can cut ambitious women like Amy Greene in two. It’s never didactic, however. The reader experiences everything Amy grapples with in real time. We’re in her shoes, feeling her anguish over not being everything everyone needs at all times. For me, that was powerful.”

To See Beyond: Essays by Anna Badkhen (Bellevue Literary Press). Reviewed by Sara Polsky. “Her essays call for a widening of the scales at which we think about seemingly contemporary problems. They are global, ancient, and impactful beyond regional or national boundaries, and solving them will require a return to — or a renewed awareness of — traditional practices and forgotten folklore. For Badkhen, who was raised outside of faith, that has even come to include prayer, which can ‘extend ourselves outside of our dailyness, to restructure our seeing and listening.’”

Questions 27 & 28: A Novel by Karen Tei Yamashita (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by David A. Taylor. “In Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita has created a stunning indictment of the fallout from two loaded queries on an obscure, long-ago bureaucratic questionnaire. In the process, she brings the historical archive, in all its messiness, to life.”

Men Like Ours: A Novel by Bindu Bansinath (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Patricia S. Gormley. “While Bansinath alternates among many voices, the most important belong to women — both in the collective first-person-plural prologue and in the omniscient narrator’s relating of group conversations. That prologue is a master class in stage-setting: In it, the women describe the divisions and expectations in both gender and cultural norms. The titular men are hypocritical, lazy, careless, uninterested, and reliant on the women to do everything from keeping Desi culture alive to raising the children. It is visceral, cutting, and as sharply observed as anything by Jane Austen (if Austen had chosen to concern herself with oral sex).”

Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press). Reviewed by Gabrielle Stecher Woodward. “For Beard, classics represents not an idealized world worthy of untempered admiration but an invitation to think critically, perhaps for the first time, about the allure of antiquity on an individual level. Why does the classical world move us still? And why do we each seem to have our own unique stories to tell about those first private moments of recognition, when we realized there is something undeniably seductive (for better and for worse) about ancient Greece and Rome?”

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (The Dial Press). Reviewed by Kitty Kelley. “In this unputdownable book, Burden proves to that college lunkhead Greg that she’s a writer of style and substance, something that may astound her ex-husband. As she dissects their divorce in searing detail, you can almost hear the waves of applause thundering across the country and driving the memoir to the bestseller list, where it remains six months after its release. Just as sweet for the discarded wife is the sale of her story to Netflix, with Gwyneth Paltrow contracted to play the lead.”

Mare: A Novel by Emily Haworth-Booth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Gretchen Lida. “Mare, also like ‘Fleabag,’ is a meditation on grief, not only for what was but for what never will be. The death of a dog sets the plot in motion, and the narrator’s struggle to have a baby keeps the wheels turning. One of the few characters who gets a name is Chelsea, a woman who writes a saccharine online newsletter about finding meaning while child-free. The narrator’s mother sends it to her in a hollow attempt to connect. The juxtaposition of the grief in the narrator’s lived experience with Chelsea’s painfully sunny emails creates such an exacting cognitive dissonance that I could feel it in my teeth.”

Subscribe to our newsletter here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Advertise with us here.