Michael Schaub
Michael Schaub is a writer, book critic and regular contributor to NPR Books. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Portland Mercury and The Austin Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Patrick Dacey puts his characters through the wringer in his new novel, a wrenching saga of a profoundly unhappy family set against the ostensibly idyllic background of Cape Cod.
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Slovak author Jana Beňová's English language debut is a bizarre, oblique — but beautiful — series of vignettes about a couple who spend their time drinking and smoking in Bratislava coffee shops.
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Pajtim Statovci's debut novel follows a Kosovar immigrant to Finland who meets a singularly unpleasant anthropomorphic cat in a Finnish gay bar. But while the story is imaginative, it lacks polish.
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Lesley Nneka Arimah's remarkable debut collection is both cohesive and varied at the same time. Grounded both in the U.S. and Nigeria, it's full of sly humor, genuine emotion and occasional horror.
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Erika Carter's intelligent, unpretentious debut follows an aimless group of friends in their 20s, whose lives spin out of control during a supposedly detoxifying trip to a remote house in the country.
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Rockabilly singer J.D. Wilkes hints at supernatural happenings in his novel about an unbelievable adventure through a kudzu-infested forest in western Kentucky.
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Suspense is the driving force in Hari Kunzru's thriller about two young white men who invent a fictional blues singer.
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Mohsin Hamid's new novel imagines a country, never specified, swollen with refugees from an ongoing conflict — and a series of mysterious doors that appear, offering escape, but also displacement.
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David Grossman's unsettling new novel takes place over the course of a two-hour comedy set, as what seems like just a bad performance evolves into something truly strange, painful and urgent.
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Margaret Drabble's new novel follows a 70-something woman as she travels around England for her job — working with old age homes — and grumbling about how sad, funny and genuinely absurd aging is.