NOTE: This is a debut guest review from Sami Skelton. You can expect more guest reviews from Sami in the future, and remember that you can always submit your own guest reviews for consideration to dbcreads@gmail.com.
If you looked in at your life as a clueless, third-party observer, would you like what you saw? Or would you be disappointed? Can you imagine what it would feel like to not even recognize your own face?
The Song Remains The Same follows the life of Nell Slattery, a successful art gallery owner, after she survives a devastating plane crash of which she is one of two survivors. Nell may have survived, but her memory of the past 32 years of her life did not.
The life Nell’s forgotten wasn’t a fairytale; her past life was wrought with complications and drama. All Nell has to go on in her attempt to regain her past is a not-so-fun game of he said/she said, and Nell doesn’t know who to believe. Nell’s family and friends don’t always keep her best interests in mind and each person’s version of the past differs from the next.
In this swift and engrossing translation from the original Italian, Divorce Islamic Style can be seen for exactly what it is: a literary moment in the hands of a writer whose degrees in both philosophy and cultural anthropology interlock our empathy and our ineptness. Amara Lakhous, in fact, knows how to make our exposure to this underbelly feel like nothing less than a treat.
The founders of 
Nick Arvin is a totally nice, approachable, funny guy, which I know because we met him. For reasons perhaps undisclosable by the University of Denver, I have one of 98 paper-bound copies of his novel, 
There is a moment in Hari Kunzru’s dizzying novel 
It might just be me — and that’s not at all unlikely — but I can’t say for sure.
The writer Sarah Manguso is a cut above. In her latest, 
