Ever since the publication of No Easy Day, former Navy SEAL and author Mark Owen (a pen name) has been a familiar and controversial figure. His first memoir detailed his participation in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. His follow-up book, No Hero, is full of stories about his SEAL training and some of the missions […]
Fiction can show us lives and worlds that don’t exist, or that we have no access to. History can help us understand our world. Biographies can help us understand the people in it. But many books are written at a remove—no matter how well-researched or how well-written, the author didn’t actually experience what they’re writing […]
Everything I Never Knew, by Celeste Ng, has been lauded as one of the year’s best debut novels. The delicately written story of a missing Chinese American teenager in the 1970s is equal parts thriller, moving family drama, and an insightful look at the challenges faced by mixed-race children straddling great cultural divides. The Sleepwalker’s […]
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, has won admirers and courted controversy for its frank depiction of the inner workings of the mind of a teenage boy living a hardscrabble life on a Native American reservation and trying to fit in at an all-white school. (Unsurprisingly, he thinks about sex. […]