Rohan Maitzen

Early in my first reading of Tammy Armstrong’s Pearly Everlasting, I found myself searching online for answers to questions like “Can bears be domesticated?” and “Do bears bond with humans?” I knew I was making a category error: Pearly Everlasting is a novel, after all. More than that, it is a novel imbued with a deep sense of…

David Bergen’s latest novel, Away from the Dead, begins with a small-scale personal story. In 1899, in the Ukrainian city of Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro), twenty-two-year-old Julius Lehn, a bookish professor, meets eighteen-year-old Katka Martens, a bright, politically engaged student. He is an atheistic Jew; she grew up in a Mennonite colony. He is…