Category: Fiction

Last First Snow is the fourth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence in publication order, but the first chronologically: it’s set in Dresediel Lex, the desert city of fourteen million where Two Serpents Rise (which was the second book, both in publication order and chronologically) also takes place. I wouldn’t recommend starting the series here,…

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is often an uncomfortable read, but it should be: its narrator is an astronomy grad student with an eating disorder, and she’s in a long-distance relationship with a guy dealing (or rather not dealing) with alcoholism. The binary star of the title is the book’s metaphor for their relationship—two stars orbiting…

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island reminded me a bit of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, in that they both feature writer-narrators engaged in a project of writing/observation whose result, basically, is the book you’re reading. I liked 10:04 a bit more, because it’s got more New York in it and is more lyrical and optimistic, but I liked…

I mostly read Exodus because I’m a completist—it was bugging me that I’d read the first two books of this trilogy about, as the back cover puts it, “the two preposterous philosophical anti-heroes,” Lars and W., but hadn’t read the third. This third book is more of the same, which is mostly a good thing,…

“Where does trouble come from? How do you get into it?” (9). For fourteen-year-old Gwen Needle, the trouble, and also the adventure, starts on Memorial Day, when she’s caught shoplifting at a drugstore. She also has a falling out with her mean-girl best friend, quits the synchronized swimming team she’s been on (partly because of…

I was worried, at first, that The First Bad Man was going to be weird for the sake of weirdness, and awkward/uncomfortable without any sort of payoff for it. But while the book is plenty weird and awkward and uncomfortable, it’s also funny and readable and sometimes surprisingly sweet. The narrator is Cheryl Glickman, who…

Like Lars Iyers’s Spurious trilogy (which I’ve only read two-thirds of, though I do plan to rectify that), Wittgenstein Jr is a funny book, and by funny I mean amusing and also strange. It’s partly a satire of academia, and partly a coming-of-age story, but saying that doesn’t give a proper sense of Iyers’s distinctive…

I wonder how I would have felt about Green Girl if it had been around for me to read when I was in college, when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I wonder how much Ruth, the main character, would have felt relatable: “I am a mess, mess, mess she thinks,” on…

Wolf in White Van is weird and claustrophobic and alternately beautiful and bleak. Its narrator, Sean Phillips, is the creator of Trace Italian, a text-based game played through the mail. Sean doesn’t go out much: he suffered a disfiguring injury when he was seventeen, in which he almost died but didn’t, and his reconstructed face,…

I don’t think I can write about this book without talking about a significant plot-point that isn’t revealed until partway through it. So if you’re spoiler-averse, you might want to stop reading now. So, right: I was really really enjoying Dept. of Speculation. The beginning of the book is such a delight: interesting form, humor,…