“Why do people catfish? People don’t feel confident in who they are, so they pretend they’re someone else.” William Dameron’s selfie was stolen countless times. It would even show up as a Google image search for “forty-year-old, white male.” Many women were victims to scams perpetrated by men who assumed his image as their own.…

How does a reviewer write about a novel that centers on a particularly awful incident without ruining the reader’s discovery of how it affects the main character?  Not an easy task but I will try to discuss the novel without revealing this central fact. Adult Ari Silverman is a tenured medieval studies professor at a…

Much has been written about the special friendship between Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. Louis Bayard’s novel is a fictional take, told from the views of Mary Todd and Speed. Since Lincoln and Speed almost always spoke to each other using surnames, I will do the same. Mary Todd relocated to Springfield, Illinois to live…

Set in Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, Paul is a queer theory student and works as a bartender. Though described as “quiet and white…like the whole state,” there is a sizable quotient of liberal, progressive students, released from their previous mundane environments and thrust into a whirlwind of new experiences. Paul’s experiences…