Category: Fiction

(by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson) Each of the four sections of this novel is a memory piece, the story of the narrator’s relationship with someone who was once in her life but isn’t anymore (two lovers, a friend, her now-dead mother). Based on the story’s timeline, it’s clear that the virus the narrator…

(by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos) As David Bellos explains in his introduction, “Around 1968, a French computer company set itself the challenge of finding artists willing to have a go at using the machines that it made.” In this case, Perec “accepted the challenge to write as a computer functions,” and this delightful…

(by Arkady Martine) I picked this one up randomly at the library and am glad I did: this turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable read for me. One of the epigraphs is a quote from this New Yorker article by Alice Gregory about the architect Luis Barragán, and I’d recommend reading the article as…

(by Ali Smith) I will read anything by Ali Smith but dystopias are generally not my thing, and reading about a near-future dystopia feels especially rough right now. But there’s a horse in it (the horse is the title character, in fact) and in the end I think there were more things I liked about…

(by Nick Earls) Having recently read the second book (Venice) in this series of five linked novellas, I wanted to go back and read this one, which is the first. While Venice was set in Australia, this one features an Australian abroad: our narrator, Jeff, is in New York partly for work and partly for…

(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…