Hannah Perry

When you're planning a trip, choosing a guidebook is like choosing a travel companion. With spring break close enough to taste and summer within sight, travelers seeking an experience beyond the resort bubble will want to start reading up on their chosen destinations.

Short stories have a long history of being overshadowed by the brawnier, sexier novel. “My first short story is being published in XYZ Magazine” doesn’t really hold the same cachet as, “My first novel’s being published.” And short story collections rarely make the best-seller list, even when they garner the same amount of critical praise as, say, the latest Michael Chabon.

Peter Hoeg can’t be accused of lacking ambition. The Quiet Girl, the Danish novelist’s fifth novel, takes on a multitude of weighty spiritual and philosophical concerns in the form of a clunky political thriller that centers on an aging clown with intimacy issues and mystical acoustic powers.

An unjust war, tensions between immigrants and natives, bourgeois complacency—no, this isn’t a rundown from today’s New York Times. Trespass, veteran writer Valerie Martin’s latest novel, focuses on a microcosm of the tensions and misunderstandings currently playing out across the United States.

Part extended ancient history lesson, part memoir, and part journalistic meditation, Travels With Herodotus is acclaimed Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s final work and, it must be said from the outset, not among his masterpieces.

Imagine bringing Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, and eight other writers together for an hour and a half in front of a full house.

As the number of people claiming more than one national identity grows ever larger, it can be easy to fall into the "global village" trap, to believe that all cultural differences can be negotiated and that all human conceptions of love, madness, and the like are universal.

Who is the voice of our generation?

By hannah perry
Columbia Daily Spectator

Founding Believer editor Heidi Julavits' new book, The Uses of Enchantment, teases our fundamental assumptions about relationships and the objective nature of truth, even as it entertains the reader with an intriguing plot and characters.