Josh Cook, Author at Cambridge | Somerville Independent

Reviewed: ‘Enough About Angels’ is a fast introduction to a Nobel winner you may decide to keep ignoring

by Josh Cook November 10, 2026

The Nobel lecture is a chance for the winner to introduce themselves and their work to a new audience. With Krasznahorkai, it takes just a few pages.

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Reviewed: ‘Wickhills’ is a fantasy spy thriller that loves its setting – and by the end you will too

by Josh Cook October 27, 2026

A thrilling race for the truth that has all the twists, double-crosses, contests of wits, clever gadgets, shady associates and daring escapes of the best spy thrillers.

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Reviewed: ‘Ancient Algorithms’ is experimental and lots of fun, but complicates by adding AI to the canon

by Josh Cook October 6, 2026

Playful, and goofy, here a handful of poems are translate, mistranslated, subjected to complicated rewriting policies and run through technologies to create new works.

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Reviewed: ‘The Sexuality of Care’ talks about a world without hospitals through a tangle of angles

by Josh Cook September 29, 2026

Readers might bristle at the thought but recognize the power of the vision in essays recalling time as a critical care nurse, healing from trauma, and the structures of kink.

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Reviewed: A powerful ‘Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis’

by Josh Cook September 8, 2026

Modeled after the KKK, the Veiled Prophet shows up in the roots of the Cold War, opposition to civil rights, support for the Vietnam War and maybe violence in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Reviewed: Freed by grief to be a private detective and on an Alice B. Toklas hunt in ‘Bone Horn’

by Josh Cook August 25, 2026

“Bone Horn” maintains its precarious balance between absurdity and grief, work and childcare, bodies and books.

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Reviewed: ‘Night Night Fawn’ has a repellent narrator and a twist that will shake you

by Josh Cook August 18, 2026

You probably won’t like Barbara, the narrator of Jordy Rosenberg’s incandescent new novel, but you'll have to consider what justice means for such people.

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Reviewed: ‘Designated Stranger’ is a poetry road trip that isn’t trying to escape

by Josh Cook August 4, 2026

Gion Davis repairs that myth of the open road by helping it grow into a more mature celebration of the joys of fearless living, not messiness.

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Reviewed: ‘On the Other Side is March’ is a clear-eyed look at caring for a fading parent

by Josh Cook July 28, 2026

Sólrún Michelsen tries to give caregivers language and images that make it easier to bear a burden, hold on when adrift or see in the fog.

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Reviewed: ‘Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One,’ a sci-fi romance that invites the reader onto the page

by Josh Cook June 25, 2026

A wild genre tornado of a novel will support many different readings on many different levels, satisfying, thrilling and perplexing many different readers.