Category: Fiction

(by Maurice Leblanc, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos) In his introduction to this edition, Michael Sims calls Arsène Lupin “the most entertaining felon in literature,” and I was definitely entertained by the thirteen stories in this volume—though I think I liked the final three “Prince Rénine” stories the most of all. Still, there are…

(by Rainbow Rowell) I picked this book up on a Friday night when I was looking for a palate-cleanser of a novel between nonfiction reads, and it definitely delivered. I found it pretty unputdownable—I’m pretty sure I would have finished it on Sunday evening had it not been for the fact that on Sunday evening…

(by Sally Rooney) I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book about a pair of brothers (who are ten years apart in age and not particularly close to one another) whose father has just died; family dramas are not always my thing. But it’s Sally Rooney, so added to the family drama we have…

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) I liked this book, which is the second in a trilogy that started with Scattered All Over the Earth, just as much as I liked the first one—which is to say, quite a bit. This one, like the first one, is made up of chapters that are first-person…

(by Susanna Clarke) This is the second book I’ve read this month that’s a read-in-a-single-sitting wintry kind of book. I read this one while watching snow fall outside and appreciated the book’s setting—which is, go figure, a snowy wood. Victoria Sawdon’s gorgeous illustrations add a lot to the text, which is about a young woman…

(by James Baldwin) In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat…

(by Brian Francis) I wish I’d read the original Canadian version of this rather than the Americanized one (I mean, geez, readers in the US are not going to be totally confused by a reference to Tim Hortons), but ah well. (I wonder if this would have been Americanized to the same extent if it…

(by Hannah Levene) This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens…