Book Post | Ann Kjellberg | Substack

Fiction and literature

Review: Jean McGarry on Camus

I had relished the notebooks Camus wrote in his twenties, read when I was just as young. Encountering a new, much-expanded edition now in a different…

May 27

Review: Sarah Ruden on Emily Brontë

The overriding reason to persist in trying to know the shadowy Emily is her singularity and impressiveness

May 21

Review: Joy Williams on Jón Kalman Stefánsson

A perfect little novel

May 14

Diary: Clare Carlisle, Writing a Whole Life

A biographer's subject matter is typically a whole life. What is that?

Apr 22

Review: Abby Rosebrock on Nancy Lemann

Deceptively comedic work that smuggles within it challenging revelations

Apr 15

Ann’s Notebooks

Notebook: On Reviewing

I wrote this Notebook for “Viva la Book Review,” a nonprofit that supports book reviews in print, digital, and audio media.

21 hrs ago • Ann Kjellberg

Notebook: Alt Writing III

Critics’ Uncertainty Principle: Is the character of culture altered by being observed?

May 6 • Ann Kjellberg

Notebook: Alt Writing II

Alt weeklies were natural critics of the media and establishments, natural workshops of a writer-driven style

May 5 • Ann Kjellberg

The latest from

Ann Kjellberg

Notebook: On Reviewing

History and society

Review: Andrew Hui on the Art of Color

Andrew Hui reviews Nabil Ali’s "Gold from Newton's Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes"

Jun 4

Review: Roland Allen on the Libraries of Timbuktu

How a polyglot destination for thirsty long-distance trade caravans became a centuries-old sanctuary for books

Apr 29

Diary: Robert Morgan, Wildacres

At home I would have been tying bean strings and hoeing corn in the hot fields. Instead, I was sitting on the porch high in the Blue Ridge Mountains…

Mar 26

Review: David Alff on Abundance

A scholar of infrastructure looks at prescriptions for building

Feb 25

Review: Brianna Zimmerman on Al-Andalus

A real place and a real time that lingers in art and memory

Feb 11

Science and Nature

Diary: Noah Simon, A Chestnut Civilization

Eight chestnut farmers in New York visit centuries-old chestnut trees along the “Olive Road”

Feb 18

Review: Christian Caryl Among the Amur Tigers

A new book on saving the tigers of Russia’s far east

Nov 20, 2025

Review: Tracy Daugherty on Peter Matthiessen

When cataloguing a subject’s contradictions reveals more than the biographer intends

Oct 29, 2025

Review: Joy Williams on Edward Abbey and Ecotage

The book that made other environmental movements look timid, ineffectual, compromising, and dull, and its inheritors

Jul 30, 2025

Review: Sarah Chayes on Robert Macfarlane, “Is a River Alive?”

A river is a tissue of dynamic and intimate relationships between arrowing, seeping, even air-wafted water and the land around, and the creatures within…

Jul 2, 2025