Whitney Moran

Let’s call a spade a spade: I’m a literature snob. It is a rarity for me to pick up the book that “everyone is reading,” but in this case, I’m infinitely glad I did. From their once-perfect marriage, Amy and Nick fall into a mutual loathing. On their fifth wedding anniversary she disappears, and he’s […]

“Being Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape.” Set in the late 1980s in a North Dakotan community of Ojibwe and white Americans and told from the perspective of a young native boy, Joe, The Round House explores the complexities of dangerously archaic US laws regarding its aboriginal peoples. After a brutal […]

A lonely, middle-aged Margaret H. Atwood (not the author, she reminds us) is facing an imminent divorce from her pseudo-Casanova husband, Brian; a mind-numbing job at “the button factory;” and the impending doom of a workshop on workplace differences. She’s about ready to give up when a to-do list, her mother, a religious fanatic and […]

“I was just a pawn, a character in a poorly conceived pulp novel of gore, tragedy, and painful metaphors,” so claims the zombie protagonist of Corey Redekop’s sophomore novel, Husk, a romp fully self-aware of its utter grotesqueness. Sheldon Funk, actor-turned-zombie, awakes during his own autopsy and spends the first half of the novel figuring […]

“Love, wandering, pain, the deep woods and redemption through art.” Leave it to a French-Canadian author to create a story that grinds your insides to pulp and leaves you wanting more. Nostalgic and beautifully grotesque, this novel is delightfully baroque and, although short, so striking it simply will never leave you. And the Birds Rained […]

From the snowy mountains and harsh landscape of Alaska comes The Snow Child. Inspired by the Russian fairy tale of the same name, the novel follows elderly couple Mabel and Jack who, upon suffering the ultimate tragedy—the loss of their child—escape their friends and family, move to the middle of nowhere, and attempt to make […]

No one can claim that Davy Rothbart, of NPR’s This American Life, is inexperienced when it comes to love. My Heart is an Idiot, the most appropriately titled autobiographical essay collection ever, is a road trip through the USA and Rothbart’s unfortunate dating history, peppered with random adventures. Stories like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Pee on […]

Julie Wilson refers to herself as a “literary voyeur.” Her first book—a curious collection of over 80 microfictions—is the poetic result of observing what she calls “exhibitionists,” public readers. Concentrating on readers seen on the TTC, Wilson composes short fictions inspired by nothing other than the book in question and a short physical descriptor, explaining, […]

“I am a complete and total fuckup. Which is exactly why I am equipped to write this book and tell you how to live.” This quote comes from a chapter called “How to Fail,” in memoir-writer extraordinaire Augusten Burroughs’ (Running with Scissors) newest book, This is How. Focused on how to survive the un-survivable—from deadly […]