Category: Fiction

I don’t generally read romance novels (semi-exception: I did have fun with Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books, though after the first one they didn’t feel that romance-y) and when I started this one I wasn’t sure I was going to be into it. And I do sort of think that if I were to want…

Empty Streets, which was originally published in Czech in 2004, is the third of Michal Ajvaz’s novels to be published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press, and the third that I’ve read and enjoyed. This one is set in Prague in the summer of 1999: when it opens we meet our unnamed narrator, a…

The Seed Collectors is the sort of book that starts with a family tree, which signals that it’s probably going to be a sprawling family drama, which is not generally my favorite kind of book. And it is a sprawling family drama, sort of, with emphasis on the drama and a darkly satirical mood, but…

Today Will Be Different was not quite, for me, the complete delight that Where’d You Go, Bernadette was, but that’s setting the bar pretty high: I still liked this a whole lot. It starts off really funny (the day I started reading it, I kept interrupting my boyfriend to read him passages I found hilarious)…

As this New Yorker blog post by Lucy Ives points out, Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton is not exactly “conventional” historical fiction: it’s not full of “period intrigue,” to use Ives’s phrase, and it’s not particularly plot-driven or even, necessarily, character-driven, though the book does have a pretty tight focus on its title character,…

My boyfriend wanted to read Lud-in-the-Mist after hearing that Neil Gaiman had said he thought that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was “the finest work of English fantasy written in the past 70 years,” and that “the only thing it could be compared to was Hope Mirlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist (see this piece in the Guardian).…

I’ve been quiet for the last, um, month, but it’s not that I haven’t been reading. It’s that I’ve been (re)reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which has been totally excellent, but wow it’s a long book. I first read it in July 2005, and remember being delighted to be immersed in its world. More…

At the start of this novel we meet Karl, who’s a 40-year-old single dude who owns a bar in Chicago. He used to be the guitarist for an indie rock band that was kind of big in the late ’90s, but now he just has his bar, and his best guy friend, Wayne. Until he…

I’d been vaguely meaning to read The Portable Veblen for months, but I’d also been vaguely worried I wouldn’t like it—that it would be annoyingly trying-too-hard quirky rather than pleasingly quirky. I shouldn’t have worried, but also, I think I read this book at exactly the right time. After reading two non-fiction books in a…

I’ve been quite liking Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence since reading the first-published one, Three Parts Dead, two years ago. I like the world of this series (which features gods and demons and magic that looks like lawyering), and the way the different stories in the different books intertwine, and the way each book basically centers…