Category: Fiction

I read an excerpt from There There in the New Yorker several months ago, and I liked it a lot, but one thing that wasn’t apparent from the excerpt was the way the book is structured—which, luckily, I also liked a lot. There There keeps shifting perspectives, with different chapters focusing on different characters. Some…

Sing, Unburied, Sing opens on a boy named Jojo’s 13th birthday, which is also the day his mom gets a phone call from his dad to say he’s getting out of Parchman, the penitentiary where he’s been for the past three years. It’s a book about transitions (between childhood and adulthood, between life and death,…

When I picked up Starlings I thought it was a collection of short stories, but it isn’t, not quite. For one thing, it also includes poems and a short play. And as Walton puts it in her introduction, the short fiction here is itself varied: there are short stories but also “extended jokes,” exercises/experiments, first…

Border Districts is one of those books that I admire, even though I didn’t love it: it feels well-constructed, and there’s a lot I appreciate about Murnane’s style, even as I feel like I’m maybe not the ideal reader for this book. It’s very much in its narrator’s head—if you’re looking for something plot-driven, look…

Animals Eat Each Other is short and dark and intense, the kind of book it was easy to read in a day, even though being immersed in its narrator’s world made me feel a little queasy. It’s a story about obsession and insecurity and need and emptiness, and if you’re bothered by the idea of…

(Note: though Eileen Myles used the pronoun “she” at the time this book was written, they now use the singular “they,” so that’s what I’m using here.) Near the end of Inferno (which is split into three sections, each one loosely corresponding to a section of Dante’s Divine Comedy), Eileen Myles writes that “poetry is…

I don’t know what to say about Concluding other than that I agree with the quote from Deborah Eisenberg on the cover of the edition I read: “Uncanny, gorgeous, enigmatic.” Concluding takes place over the course of a single day at an all-girls boarding school for future state servants, somewhere in England, in a vague…

In an author’s note at the start of the book, The Iliac Crest is described as “a novel delving into the fluid nature of gender dis/identifications,” “set in a time in which disappearance has become a plague,” and a book in which “borders are a subtle but pervasive force” (vii). That all sounded pretty exciting…

I find Charles Finch’s mysteries to be a reliable pleasure, and Home by Nightfall lived up to my expectations. It’s set in the fall/winter of 1876, in London and in Sussex. Detective Charles Lenox finds himself investigating a pair of (unrelated) crimes: one in the city, and the other in the country village where he…

Formally/stylistically, Talking It Over is a whole lot of fun. In each chapter, we get alternating first-person narratives—mostly from the three main characters (Gillian, Oliver, and Stuart), but from others as well (Gillian’s mother, Oliver’s landlady, et cetera). Each character has a distinct voice, and we often hear about the same events from different characters’…