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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part VIII
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first and writing about it. Previous entries: Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43...
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part IX
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first and writing about it. Previous entries: Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43...
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part X
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first and writing about it. Previous entries: Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43...
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Darker sensations | A review of Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun
I read Italo Calvino’s posthumous collection Under the Jaguar Sun over the past three days (in William Weaver’s 1988 translation). When I bought it last month I had no idea that it was a collection of...
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Between parentheses | On Julio Cortázar’s “Letters from Mom”
Julio Cortázar’s story “Letters from Mom” is available in English for the first time thanks to translator Magdalena Edwards and the good folks at Sublunary Editions. First published in Cortázar’s 1959...
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See the girl | A report from Marlon James’s novel Moon Witch, Spider King
One night I was in the dream jungle. It was not a dream, but a memory that jump up in my sleep to usurp it. And in the dream memory is a girl. See the girl. These four sentences open Marlon James’s...
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Is this a review of David Shields’“autobiography” The Very Last Interview?
Is David Shields’ new book The Last Interview indeed an “autobiography in question form, with the reader working to supply answers based on the questions that follow,” as Bret Easton Ellis’ blurb...
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Hiroko Oyamado’s subtle novel The Hole captures the banal surreal loneliness...
Hiroko Oyamada’s novel The Hole is a subtle, slim, slow-burn low-stakes horror story that tiptoes neatly between banality and surrealism. Our first-person narrator is Asahi, a young, recently-married...
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A few thoughts on John Williams’ brilliant historical novel Augustus
At the beginning of April, an old friend (who wrote some excellent reviews on this site in the past) told me that I needed to read John Williams’ 1972 novel Augustus. I loved Williams’ Stoner, which I...
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Not toward peace | On Antonio di Benedetto’s novel The Silentiary
“I don’t live well,” the unnamed narrator of Antonio di Benedetto’s novel The Silentiary tells the young woman he will soon marry. “The excuse isn’t clear to her, though she tries to follow its...
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Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat is a funny, ludic novel about trauma...
A book should be like a lot of spit. But who would publish me? Who publishes a person who’s sort of soaking in pain, who can’t always walk, employed only pretty much in name? Did writing exist in...
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Schrödinger’s Deer | A review of Dashiel Carrera’s surreal debut novel The Deer
Dashiel Carrera’s debut novel The Deer is puzzling, sometimes brilliant, and occasionally frustrating. Gloomy, surreal, and terse, The Deer is at its best when it’s at its most sinister—namely, on its...
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Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Telluria is a polyglossic satirical epic pieced...
Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel Telluria, in its first English translation thanks to the estimable talents of Max Lawton, is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in a long time. Telluria is a...
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Vladimir Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts made me physically ill. (This is praise.)
Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Their Four Hearts (in English translation by Max Lawton) made me physically ill several times. To be clear, the previous statement is a form of praise. I finished it a few...
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October recommendation: Fireworks, Angela Carter’s collection of...
It’s October, and maybe you want some light heavy reading, something titillating but deep, sharp, maybe a little gross at times, always unnerving, right? How about reading Angela Carter’s 1974...
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On Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, a spare, precise study of...
I forced myself through the last half of Gwendoline Riley’s 2017 novel First Love wondering if I actually liked her latest novel My Phantoms, a book I read just a few weeks ago. (What do I mean to...
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On A.V. Marraccini’s ekphrastic, discursive book We the Parasites
Detail from The Age of Alexander, 1959 by Cy Twombly “The best and most skilled of parasites live, reproduce, and die, without their hosts ever really knowing, or at least being able to do anything...
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A review of The Stronghold, Dino Buzzati’s novel of deferred hope and...
Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari (retitled The Stronghold in Lawrence Venuti’s new English translation) takes place in an unidentified time in an unidentified country. Our protagonist...
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Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions is a brash and brilliant picaresque...
A few pages into Bernardo Zannoni’s brash, brilliant novel My Stupid Intentions, our narrator Archy and his eldest brother Leroy have the following conversation about their youngest brother Otis: “Are...
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A review of Trey Ellis’s polyglossic satire Platitudes
Trey Ellis’s 1988 debut novel Platitudes begins with a typical metatextual conceit: the novel-within-a-novel gambit. Our story starts with Earle, a nerdy, idealistic high school sophomore who lusts...
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