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An interview with Scott Esposito, author of The Missing Books
When I first heard about the concept for Scott Esposito’s new book The Missing Books, I thought, Damn. I wish I had thought of that. Then I read it and thought, Damn, I wish I had written that. The...
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An interview with literary critic Daniel Green about his new book, Beyond the...
Daniel Green’s The Reading Experience was one of the first sites I started reading regularly when I first started blogging about literature on Biblioklept. If you regularly read literary criticism...
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A review of Robert Coover’s excellent new novel Huck Out West
In the final lines of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our narrator-hero declares: “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s...
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Article 2
A review of Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Tagged: American literature, Art, Black writers, Books, Comedy, George Herriman, Ishmael Reed, Krazy Kat, Postmodernism, Putney Swope, Reviews,...
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A review of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed’s syncretic Neo-HooDoo...
Ishmael Reed’s second novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down tells the story of the Loop Garoo Kid, a “desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the...
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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest
A note to readers new to Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of...
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Helen DeWitt’s novel Lightning Rods just wasn’t for me
I sought out Helen DeWitt’s so-called cult novel The Last Samurai a few weeks ago after hearing buzz about it for the past few years. I couldn’t find it at the library or at my local bookstore, but I...
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Jane Bowles’ novel Two Serious Ladies confounds with sinister humor and dark...
Two Women, Gwen John Here’s a short review of Jane Bowles’ only novel, Two Serious Ladies: The book is amazing, a confounding, energetic picaresque suffused with sinister humor and dark delight. I...
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Flann O’Brien’s Novel The Third Policeman Is a Surreal Comic Masterpiece
Illustration for Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman by Nancy Martinez Here’s the short review: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is a dark, comic masterpiece—witty, bizarre, and buzzing with...
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The Never-Ending Torture of Unrest | Georg Büchner’s Lenz Reviewed
Composed in 1836, Georg Büchner’s novella-fragment Lenz still seems ahead of its time. While Lenz’s themes of madness, art, and ennui can be found throughout literature, Büchner’s strange, wonderful...
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The Inhumanity Museum
Near the end of the first cycle-section of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, protagonist Anna Wulf abandons the pretense of personal narrative in favor of pastiche, collage, clipping. Our...
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A review of João Gilberto Noll’s surreal novella Quiet Creature on the Corner
Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press. The book is probably best read without any kind of...
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At any moment they could could swell and become something other than what...
I was too young the first time I took a crack at Paul Bowles’ 1949 debut novel The Sheltering Sky. I was maybe 15 or 16 I think, reading a lot of Hemingway, Vonnegut, and William Burroughs at the...
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Let me recommend Antonio di Benedetto’s overlooked novel Zama
Let me recommend a novel for you. The novel is Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama. Zama was first published in Argentina in 1956. NYRB published Esther Allen’s English translation in 2016. It is excellent....
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A quick note on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog
I surprised myself by picking up and rapidly reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 Soviet satire The Heart of a Dog this week. I read Michael Glenny’s translation (Harcourt Brace, 1968) at a quick clip,...
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A review John Williams’s cult novel Stoner
John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner documents the quiet and often painful life of William Stoner, an English professor at the University of Missouri. In a direct, lucid style, the novel follows Stoner...
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On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about storytelling
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a television series by Hulu, a fact which you probably already knew if you are on the internet and are interested in these sorts...
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Not a review of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian
What follows is not a novel of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which I read this weekend (in Deborah Smith’s 2015 English language translation). Here—by which I mean this link—is a review of The...
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“Translation is an act of risk”| An interview with Rainer J. Hanshe on...
Rainer J. Hanshe is the translator of My Heart Laid Bare & Other Texts, a collection of writings by Charles Baudelaire, new from Contra Mundum Press. Over a series of emails, Hanshe was kind...
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Lost in The Vorrh
I got lost in Brian Catling’s expansive 2012 novel The Vorrh, a phantasmagorical critique of colonialism set in and around a massive, possibly infinite jungle called the Vorrh. Apparently God likes to...
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